It is an experimental replacement for yum [1], evolving from yum's code. It handles packages using rpm [2] libsolv [3] and hawkey [4] libraries.

As of July 2012, DNF and all its dependencies are available in rawhide Fedora (to be Fedora 18)[5]. It is not straightforward to use DNF with Fedora 17 and earlier, unless you update rpm and libdb to the Fedora 18 versions first. Might warrant rebuilding rpm database so know what you are doing and do backup.

[1] http://yum.baseurl.org/
[2] http://rpm.org/
[3] https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv
[4] https://github.com/akozumpl/hawkey
[5] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=14310