The latest release features improved device access, improved virtualization.

Red Hat Inc. announced the release of Fedora 13, the Linux distro and with it comes a list of new features that enhance performance, access and quality assurance.

Fedora 13 contains an improved installer interface that handles partitioning, driver installation, and storage devices more efficiently. Packaged software will allow for scheduled backups, automatic photo import and management.

Fedora 13 also gets improved driver support in the form of automatic printer driver installs and improved 3D graphics drivers for Intel, Nvidia and ATI video cards.

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is now more efficient, as is performance on large-scale multiprocessor systems. Its now possible to for virtual machines to use the same physical network interface cards as the host OS.

Mixed library debugging within GNU debugger (gdb) is now more comprehensive and the SystemTap utility now supports static probes, which allow application developers to abserve how their code interacts with system resources. SystemTap also includes scripts that show Python activity across the entire system and monitor Python call and return functions. These tools make it easier to identify choke points that occur between an application and its function calls. Both Python 2.6 and Python 3 are included in Fedora 13.

On the filesystem front, Fedora supports Btrfs, with added support to filesystem snapshots. Snapshots allow the system to be reverted to a previous state.

Fedora 13 is available now here.

The latest release features improved device access, improved virtualization.