Fedora 31 available

Fedora 31 is now available, the next iteration of the somewhat bleeding edge of Red Hat (the totally bloody-all-over-the-floor edge is of course Rawhide). It is of particular interest to me personally since the Talos II I'm typing on is running Fedora 30, and it's a useful canary for future hiccups on Power ISA especially because Red Hat is an IBM thing now. Even if you don't use Fedora personally, its relatively rapid update schedule can help identify and fix architecture-specific issues well in advance in your own distro of choice.

F31 moves to GNOME 3.34 (presumably with performance improvements, so I look forward to seeing how this performs on my GPU-less Blackbird) and glibc 2.30. This last is particularly important to Power systems because it may finally mark the end of the 128-bit long double saga by transitioning to the new float ABI. Fedora is also encouraging the use of toolbox, a workspace container system; this too is supported on ppc64le, though I haven't messed with it much yet. Finally, based on this report, F31's use of LLVM 9 should also solve the codegen and faulty assertion issue plaguing librsvg2. Since I now have two POWER9 systems here, I'll do a test upgrade on the Blackbird and then the Talos II once the package mirrors have caught up, reporting back as in our prior reviews, but if these improvements in fact live up to the release notes this actually sounds like a really nice release for us especially.

In miscellaneous notes, F29 will be unsupported one month after this point, so make sure you're upgrading if you're still on that, and 32-bit i686 is no longer a thing on Fedora. (32-bit PowerPC was unsupported long ago in F22, just to desperately keep on topic.)