Episode 62

What is Fedora Hummingbird Linux?

October 15th, 2026

47 mins 16 secs

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About this Episode

Red Hat announced Hummingbird at Summit back in May. Five months later there are Hummingbird containers in the wild, a spin of Fedora Linux built on the same principles, and a full Bluefin ISO built on top of it.

Scott McCarty is a senior principal product manager at Red Hat who kicked off Podman with the team and launched Red Hat Universal Base Image. Jorge Castro runs Project Bluefin and was last on the show back when it was still rpm-ostree. Noah is out this week, so Eric flies solo.

We get into:

  • Two things launched at Summit, not one. Red Hat hardened images went generally available and Fedora Hummingbird Linux was announced, and they are not the same thing
  • The real difference between them, which comes down to whether there is a kernel in it. A container image will never boot. Add a kernel and it becomes a bootable container
  • Roughly 95 percent of Hummingbird comes from Fedora Rawhide, with the rest pulled from the major releases or run ahead of Fedora when something lands upstream first
  • Why patching speed suddenly matters, and Scott walking through time to exploit collapsing from two and a half years and a seven person team down to days for one person
  • Risk based versus compliance based patching, and why Scott will not call any of this more secure, only different
  • Utah Raptor, which Jorge built the first cut of in a bar on a dare, and what it took 13 people 22 days to turn into a shippable Bluefin
  • What it actually takes to point an existing bootc home lab at Hummingbird, which turns out to be a pointer change

Scott and Jorge both close with the same ask: tell them what you would actually use this for. The Fedora discussion threads are open, and there is a thread for every episode of this show.

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