LABS GALLERY: Fedora 12 Beta Boasts Security, Management and Virtualization Updates

by Jason Brooks

I used Fedora 12’s sandbox-X feature to run Adobe’s oft-attacked Reader in an environment isolated from the rest of my system.

With Firefox sandboxed, I could browse to sites of questionable virtue knowing that the contents of my system remained off limits to the application.

I fired up a few VMs, including two identical Ubuntu instances, to try out Fedora 12’s KSM (kernel shared memory) feature.

Enabling the KSM service on my host machine led to an immediate drop in memory use as pages duplicated between my Ubuntu VMs merged.

A tool called netcap checks the capabilities that network-facing services enjoy. Services with excessive capabilities can be targeted for hardening.

Fedora 12 includes a version of the PolicyKit user permissions management framework that’s been rewritten to facilitate integration with networked resources such as directory servers.