System Requirements

[Adam Williamson]

On 02/04/13 01:28 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 04/02/2013 07:48 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The docs team has begun assembling release notes for Fedora 19, and
>> I've been thinking over hardware requirements.
>>
>> Historically, we have cited the CPU, storage, and especially memory
>> requirements for the default installation - a basic GNOME desktop.
>> After checking in with the anaconda team, and dropping into Monday's
>> QA meeting, I think this merits some discussion.
>>
>> I have started a thread on the development list to gather input on the
>> kind of roles we'd like to represent, and urge you to share your
>> thoughts there.  However, establishing a set of use cases is only the
>> first part of the effort; we still need the figures.
>>
>> Here's where things get sticky.   There is a clear benefit from
>> providing these kind of guidelines to our user base, but I *don't*
>> want the effort to come as a burden to the QA team.
>>
>> I'm hoping there's room in the QA process to provide guidance and
>> perhaps validation of hardware requirements. Your thoughts?
>>
>
> Anaconda set's the minimal hw requirements so you should check what's
> their today's requirement to function properly

Well, half the time the number in anaconda doesn't get touched unless 
someone bugs the anaconda team about it, so...

It's a really squishy area to try and deal with, though, honestly. I'm 
not entirely sure validating HW requirements as part of QA is realistic, 
because I mean, what if we pick 'mail/web server' as one of the roles? 
Do we have to set up a kickstart that builds out a running 
postfix/dovecot/apache/wordpress machine and run it for a couple of 
weeks and see what resource use is like? It seems a bit impractical. 
What we can do - and do do at present, though it isn't written in stone 
anywhere - is check that install is possible with various package sets 
with various amounts of RAM right around the current anaconda 'hard 
floor', but trying to determine the minimum resources for various 'real 
world scenarios' seems like it might be quite a lot of thankless work...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net