Proposing new dual booting release criteria

Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro at gnome.org
Sun Aug 24 17:23:55 UTC 2014


Hi all,

There's been some discussion on the desktop list, beginning at [1],
about Workstation's requirements for dual booting in F21. The
Workstation technical specification says the following:

"One aspect of storage configuration that will be needed is support for
dual-boot setups (preserving preexisting Windows or OS X installations),
since e.g. students may be required to run software on those platforms
for their coursework." [2]

Unfortunately, due to some bugs in anaconda we are not currently meeting
the requirement for preserving previous Windows and OS X installations,
and the story for preserving previous Linux systems (which is not a
requirement) is not any better. A good summary of these bugs is at the
bottom of [3]. We think these issues need to be treated very seriously,
since we do not expect Workstation users to be able to recover an
operating system when it is missing from the boot menu. In short:

"No boot entry or nonfunctional boot entry -> user is up a creek ->
Fedora Workstation is bad"

I therefore propose some new release criteria, based on the consensus
from the desktop list. It's possible that these new criteria will
directly result in further significant delays to the release of F21,
since there are four open bugs that would fall under these criteria, but
harming the user's previous OS is so severe that we should block on them
anyway. Fedora will not become widely popular if it remains dangerous to
install.

Windows
=======

Our current release criterion is:

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
existing clean Windows installation and, when performing a BIOS (not
UEFI) installation, install a bootloader which can boot into both
Windows and Fedora."

I propose the language be amended to the following:

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
existing clean Windows installation and install a bootloader which can
boot into both Windows and Fedora."

Rationale: many modern Windows systems no longer have a boot menu that
is accessible before the system boots. If Fedora Workstation were
installed on such a system, the user would not be able to recover
Windows.

Open bugs that would be covered by this criterion:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=986731
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1010704

OS X
====

We currently do not have any release criterion that applies to dual
booting with OS X. Since our Mac support is very poor and has no
prospect of near term improvement -- in particular, we have concerns
that running Fedora on a Mac has caused at least one Mac to overheat and
die -- the consensus seems to be that dual booting with OS X should not
be a requirement. However, it's also not OK to destroy the user's OS X
without warning. I propose the following final release criterion:

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
existing clean OS X installation and install a bootloader which can boot
into both OS X and Fedora, OR the installer must prominently warn the
user that he may be unable to boot OS X after installation, allowing the
user to cancel installation and reboot to OS X."

I think that requirement should be easy to meet, so I won't include
links to the OS X bugs.

Linux
=====

We currently do not have any release criterion that applies to dual
booting with other Linux systems. Dual booting with other Linux systems
is NOT a requirement in the Workstation technical specification, but the
consensus seems to be that it should have been. Therefore I propose the
following criterion:

"The installer must be able to install into free space alongside
existing GNU/Linux installations and install a bootloader which can boot
into the previously-installed systems and Fedora."

I have no doubt that you will need to tweak the wording here, but the
intent should be clear. If such a broad requirement isn't technically
feasible, then let's discuss what would be.

We want the criterion to cover these bugs:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825236
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=964828

[1]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-June/009932.html
[2]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Technical_Specification#System_Installer
[3]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-June/009953.html
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