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

[Chris Murphy]

On Sep 3, 2014, at 7:21 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 8:59 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz at redhat.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> There are other repos that provide it.  People are already enabling
> those repos for everything else that is highly useful but not provided
> by Fedora.

Ancient support from what I've seen so far. I suppose if I were more sane I'd go back to the pleistocene of color and btrfs testing, ~2 years ago.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> It's also a pretty terrible experience when they do get it to build
> and load and it crashes their kernel.

For me not even once in 4 years has linux crashed as a result of vbox guest drivers. Once in 4 years has xnu crashed due to vbox kernel extensions. Maybe it's because xnu isn't exactly the most bleeding edge of kernels or kernel development.

> I consider myself to be fairly open to many things.  Carrying
> virtualbox modules out-of-tree when the authors refuse to even submit
> them upstream for review and have no intention of ever doing so is not
> one of those things.  This is one of the few items where I simply say
> no.

I agree with this. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I'm only in favor of a narrow carving for improving the Fedora-VirtualBox experience, i.e. VirtualBox on Windows/OS X with Fedora as the guest, that's my interest. When I run Fedora bare metal I haven't considered using it.

Chris Murphy