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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