Release criteria: virtualization tweak

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 16:02 -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 10/14/2011 03:48 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Thanks again for this suggestion, Albert. Following this discussion I
> > went ahead and amended the Beta criteria to:
> >
> > The release must be able host virtual guest instances of the same
> > release, using Fedora's current preferred virtualization technology
> 
> What happens if we have multiple supported virt technology (that is, 
> suppose F17 supports both xen dom0 and kvm out of the box) - should the 
> be worded to cover all supported virt tech, or is it limited to just one 
> technology (and if so, which)?

'Preferred' is distinct from 'supported'. KVM is the current preferred
virt technology for Fedora. That's the tech the criterion currently
refers to. This is why we wrote a separate criterion for Xen.

> >
> > The release must install and boot successfully as a virtual guest in a
> > situation where the virtual host is running the previous stable Fedora
> > release, using Fedora's current preferred virtualization technology
> 
> That's confusing, as the preferred virtualization technology may have 
> changed between releases.
> 
> For arguments sake, we know F16 prefers kvm, and let's suppose F17 goes 
> back to xen as default.  Does that mean F17 has to boot successfully as 
> a guest in an F16 xen situation, or that F17 has to boot successfully 
> both as a xen guest of F17 and as a kvm guest of F16?
> 
> Given both those points, I suggest we alter the wording to something 
> like this:
> 
> The release must be able host virtual guest instances of the same
> release, using each of Fedora's current preferred virtualization 
> technologies.

I think you wanted to say 'supported' there, because we don't _have_
multiple preferred technologies.

> The release must install and boot successfully as a virtual guest in a
> situation where the virtual host is running the previous stable Fedora
> release, using each of the preferred virtualization technologies of that 
> prior release.

It's interesting, but I'm not sure it's quite what we want, because we
didn't really write this criterion to cover all the virt technologies we
to some extent support: it's specifically supposed to be about the _one_
virt technology Fedora prefers and recommends at any given time, viz,
currently, KVM. We've added Xen to the criteria mostly on the grounds of
its important for cloud services, it's a somewhat different case, and I
think it makes sense in that context to give it a separate criterion, as
we have.

I'd be welcome to any patch which simply addresses the problem of the
preferred technology changing between releases, though, that is indeed a
weak point.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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