Re: future of official optical media support in Fedora
On Wed, 2016-12-07 at 11:15 +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 06/12/2016 18:11, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-12-06 at 15:00 +0000, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> > W dniu 06.12.2016 o 14:43, Kamil Paral pisze:
> >
> > > All of that is, of course, motivated by trying to spend QA time more
> > > effectively. You can see the current coverage e.g. in this table [2],
> > > overall we burn 6 DVDs and perform 12 optical installation (BIOS +
> > > UEFI) for every release candidate published. We allow non-complete
> > > (yet still substantial) coverage for Alpha and Beta, but 100%
> > > coverage for Final for each candidate compose. That is quite time
> > > consuming, both burning and installation from optical media take a
> > > long time, it requires bare metal testing, and we can't use the
> > > machines for anything else during that time.
> >
> > Why not boot VM with virtual optical drive? You can choose BIOS/UEFI,
> > 32/64bit and do not require bare metal hardware for it.
>
> It's not a sufficient test. We have had real bugs in the past where a
> VM would boot from an ISO image, but real systems would not boot from
> the same ISO image burned to a real optical disc.
>
> Virtual machines are great for convenience, but they are not real
> hardware and we cannot in good conscience release our product without
> testing it on real machines with real media.
It's still a good test to do. For example, Server and netinst ISO
images are used a lot for VMs, but not for bare metal.
Of course we already test the ISOs on VMs, all the time.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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