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

[Alberto Ruiz]

On Wed, 2014-09-03 at 07:52 -0400, Josh Boyer 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.  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.

Sure, I understand and concede that VBox does a shitty job wrt their
drivers, but on the other hand it is one of the most popular desktop
virtualization solutions, it is pretty much the only way to test a Linux
desktop OS on top of Windows and Mac that doesn't require a license.

To be fair I mostly care about the graphics drivers, I/O is not a big
deal. The performance/experience of a GL enabled+autoresize guest vs. an
llvmpipe one is more than noticeable (specially if you're running on
battery).

The problem here is that they don't keep up with Fedora Workstation
kernels so the user always ends up having to install all the build
dependencies and run their clumsy .run script and wait for everything to
be built, installed and then restart the vm. Which is a pretty terrible
experience.

As per the API/ABI stability, that shouldn't be an issue as long as we
provide it ourselves right?

I wasn't aware of the out-of-tree modules, is there somewhere I can read
about the rationale behind this policy?

> 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.

Yup, so we're fine for VMWare Fusion/Workstation, and hyper-v doesn't
bother me too much from a Workstation POV as it's only available on
Windows Server. 

> josh

-- 
Greetings,
Alberto Ruiz
Engineering Manager - Desktop Applications Team
Red Hat, Inc.