Fedora 45 shipped on 3 November, two weeks late. First there was no testable release candidate by the original date. Then came the compromise of the certificate authority eMudhra, where several private keys for CA certificates were easy to guess, prompting browser makers to block the certificates. On top of that there were boot problems with encrypted pools in the Stratis storage system.
The most visible change for anyone who has ever landed on tty2 because a graphics driver died is this: the text console no longer comes from the kernel. Fedora 45 replaces the fbcon driver with kmscon, a userspace program doing the same job — and Fedora developer Jocelyn Falempe lays out three reasons it is the better arrangement.
Security: every bug in fbcon runs in kernel space, can be exploited there, and crashes it into a kernel panic. fbcon also depends on the old fbdev interface, while every GPU driver now uses DRM, which forced an emulation layer in between. Usability: fbcon only does bitmap fonts, which look tiny on HiDPI displays and cannot be resized at runtime; kmscon renders any monospace font through FreeType at any size (Ctrl+Plus, Ctrl+Minus) and covers more of Unicode. And keyboard layouts: fbcon uses different layouts from the desktop, which bites when typing passwords or foreign-language characters — kmscon uses the GNOME, KDE or Sway layout and can be switched with localectl set-keymap. Scrolling with Page Up/Down and the mouse wheel, plus a hardware cursor, come along too; fbcon lost scrolling after a CVE.
The side effects are real. kmscon uses pseudo-terminals, so `tty` returns /dev/pts/0 instead of /dev/tty1 — scripts that depend on that need adjusting. And because kmscon holds the exclusive DRM interface to the GPU, starting a graphical session from the console no longer works the old way: it takes kmscon-launch-gui, for example `kmscon-launch-gui startx`. Anyone who wants a rescue console can switch per tty — `systemctl mask kmsconvt@tty5` plus `systemctl enable --now getty@tty5` hands tty5 back to the old fbcon.
The rest of the release is solid, unglamorous work: Linux kernel 7.2, GNOME 51, KDE Plasma 6.8 (which only made it in because of the delay), Stratis support in the installer, GCC 16.2 and glibc 2.44. On Apple hardware there is Fedora Asahi Remix 45, which now supports M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max machines.
Why it matters: The console is the last place where Linux still runs kernel code to do something that is really an application's job. Moving it to userspace shrinks the kernel's attack surface and makes the rescue session as configurable as the rest of the system — at the cost of scripts that expected /dev/tty1.
What to watch: whether other distributions follow. If kmscon holds up in Fedora, fbcon is history after three decades — and with it a whole class of kernel panics nobody will miss.
