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

[Chris Murphy]

On Sep 3, 2014, at 5:52 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> 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.  

Good.

> 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.

That sounds like just about anything on Linux, though, not unique to VirtualBox. Somehow they have this stability for Windows and OS X hosts such that a single binary works across ~8 years of Windows and 5 years for OS X. The current singular binary runs on OS X versions 2009 to present, including the same kernel extensions. On just Ubuntu there are 8 different install binaries. There are ~30 installers for Linux, four of which are for Fedoras 17-19 only one of which isn't EOL.

But what a can of worms this particular observation is. You're talking about one app, but the same basic cultural dilemma the Linux world is facing is API/ABI instability. It surprises me nil that yet another app does it. There are much bigger penalties than this to be found. How many fads has udev gone through? It manages to confuse and annoy devs, distros, and end users alike. Don't like VirtualBox? Don't use it. Don't like udev? FreeBSD, Illumos, or hmmm maybe just move to a higher altitude. And then user space APIs/ABIs are as stable as children (or drunk adults) playing pin the tail on the donkey. This is a systemic problem, it's not just a VirtualBox anomaly.

>  Lastly, the
> drivers aren't of great quality to begin with and crash rather often.

Weird. I only ever use it on OS X as host, and there its kernel extensions have been implicated in one KP in 4 years. The linux guest drivers haven't ever caused me a problem, other than just not performing as well as some alternatives.

> 
> VMWare and Microsoft actually did things properly for their
> hypervisors and got the kernel drivers in the upstream kernel.org
> tree.

In some ways this is worse than being pathologically broken. Not following the process their typically proprietary peers are willing to follow, is weird.


Chris Murphy