Release criteria proposal: basic graphics mode boot

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 19:35 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Another proposed release criterion. This stems from
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623129 ; we agreed that it
> really ought to always be possible to workaround a broken X driver for
> install.
> 
> Alpha: "The graphical boot menu for all installation images should
> include an entry which causes both installation and the installed system
> to use a generic, highly compatible video driver (such as 'vesa'). This
> mechanism should work as described."

Rrrgh.  I've seen vesa break in too many ways to describe it as anything
other than a best-effort solution.  So I guess my question is what the
threshold is here.  Do we expect that vesa works on the plurality of
hardware we test it on, or do we expect that it works on everything?

As an anecdote, we had one bit of hardware that won't be supported in
RHEL 6.0 with a native driver because the upstream support isn't
completed yet.  Naturally once we made this decision we discovered that
vesa _also_ didn't work, because we were making some pretty fundamental
assumptions about the vm86 memory map that the BIOS violated.  We fixed
it, but if I hadn't had the machine in my cube it probably wouldn't have
been done in time.

- ajax
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