Multibooting UX, how well it ought to work

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2014-06-29 at 14:55 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:

> > UEFI, preexisting Windows:, boot entry either not created for Windows or it doesn't work. 
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=986731  ## Year old bug.
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1010704  ## This bug was rejected as an F20 blocker on the basis that the release criteria for Windows only applies to BIOS.
> 
> This Windows one is most serious by far. I'd interpret this as a
> violation of the guideline you quoted: "One aspect of storage
> configuration that will be needed is support for dual-boot setups
> (preserving preexisting Windows or OS X installations)."
> 
> Adam, I see in that bug your comment: "Discussed at 2013-11-13 blocker
> review meeting -
> http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-blocker-review/2013-11-13/f20-final-blocker-review-1.2013-11-13-17.01.log.txt . We agreed to amend the criterion to specify it covers the BIOS case only, and consequently this bug is rejected as a blocker."
> 
> I think this should be reconsidered. I can't figure out how to get to
> setup or a boot menu on my father's new laptop; if I were foolish enough
> to install Fedora on it, we'd never get back to Windows again.

Given our experience of real-world UEFI deployments since that time, I
do agree; at that time we were still hopeful that the EFI boot manager
could be relied on as a viable multiboot mechanism, but it does seem to
be becoming apparent that that is not the case, and we should be making
sure grub can handle booting pre-existing UEFI Windows installs. We've
got rather a lot of Fedora.next stuff on ATM, but I guess what I'd
suggest at this point is to re-nominate that bug as a Beta or Final
blocker for F21, with a summary of this discussion.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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