[RFC] non-KVM graphics/IO drivers in our default install media

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone
>
> I wanted to get some feedback as to whether it would be
> acceptable/desirable to add whatever available graphics and IO drivers
> available for the most common hypervisors out there other than
> KVM/Spice.
>
> My idea is that it should be possible to run Fedora Workstation in any
> desktop virtualization solution out of the box as long as the drivers
> are acceptable for us in terms of licensing. So VirtualBox is the
> easiest shot, and a pretty popular one on Windows and Mac users as it's
> (mostly) FOSS and free of charge, but it'd be nice if we could add
> others like Parallels or VMWare (I am investigating the
> availability/licensing situation of those as we speak).
>
> I would appreciate any feedback or concerns about this proposal.

We don't allow out-of-tree modules in Fedora.  Also, VirtualBox is
pathologically broken.  They refuse to have a stable
userspace<->kernel ABI so whenever they do a new release it can wind
up breaking things and requiring a rebuild of everything.  Lastly, the
drivers aren't of great quality to begin with and crash rather often.
The kernel team has been asked to carry VB before and we refuse to do
so.

VMWare and Microsoft actually did things properly for their
hypervisors and got the kernel drivers in the upstream kernel.org
tree.  I believe we already enable them in the Fedora kernels.

josh