OS X dual boot criterion problems

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Adam Williamson
<adamwill at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> So, where would you say we are WRT the criteria for F22 right now?
> What would be a reasonable expectation?
>
> As of right now, we have these in the F22 Final criteria:
>
> Windows dual boot
>
> 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.

On UEFI with Secure Boot enabled, the GRUB Windows menuentry fails.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1170245

This is working on openSUSE since ~2012 so it seems it ought to work
on Fedora by now. The criteria neither requires nor exempts us from
this behavior, so right now its ambiguous.

>
> OS X dual boot
>
> The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
> existing OS X installation, install and configure a bootloader that
> will boot Fedora; if the boot menu presents OS X entries, they must
> boot OS X. Installing Fedora must not inhibit the system's ability to
> boot OS X from the UEFI boot manager.

I think this can safely be changed to just the first part before the
semi-colon. It seems like removing the OS X boot entries from being
created is a cosmetic change, it means grub2-mkconfig does less work.
Niftier would be a reminder that rebooting with Option key will bring
up the built-in boot manager from which OS X can be booted. I don't
know if that's a feature change though, since it'd be nice if it's
translated. But in any case it seems to me the criteria can be chopped
to 1/3, basically just saying "Fedora ought to install to and boot a
Mac, and that the installer expects free space to do that, i.e. no
resizing."



>
> We do not have any Linux dual boot criterion.
>
> Do we need to amend the OS X or Windows criteria to reflect technical
> reality in any way? Do we want to take another shot at adding a
> limited Linux dual/multi-boot criterion before we hit Alpha? If so we
> should revisit the F21-era proposals, agree on a wording, and run it
> by anaconda-devel-list ASAP.

Some people on desktop@ agree there should be a Secure Boot criteria,
at least for single boot (Fedora). Making this apply to chainloading
(per above) met with less assurance, but this was before I tracked
down that opensuse can do this. (Ubuntu fails with the same error we
have.) If we have concensus here, then maybe this ought to go to the
WG's. I suspect all three products want Secure Boot to work for their
products, or block. Workstation is the only one that cares about SB
and dual-boot.

As for dual boot linux, it'd be great if things were friendlier. Sadly
it doesn't appear to be a priority. Bootloaderspec has an upstream and
mjg59 variant, presently the GRUB bls module sufficiently departs from
both to be on its own set of rails, and I'm not aware of any
collective distro effort to settle this. It seems like a pretty small
collection of dual boot linux users and if we play the numbers game it
seems like not a whole heck of a lot really care. Therefore I don't
know it makes sense to put effort into this on the QA side as if we
can compel what amounts to a feature to just materialize from a
criterion.


Chris Murphy