Release criteria proposal: basic graphics mode boot

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Thu Aug 12 14:29:29 UTC 2010


On Thu, 2010-08-12 at 10:09 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 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?

'Work as described' is intended to mean 'it should *actually* use vesa'.
It's just to cover the case of the current breakage (where the entry is
present but doesn't actually cause vesa to be used).

If you can think of clearer wording, that'd be great =)

> 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.

If you want to add another to your collection, try installing F14 into a
kvm vm and set vesa as the X driver and start X...for me, it blank
screens. Only the 'native' cirrus driver works.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net



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