On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 6:47 AM, Richard Ryniker <ryniker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>an optical specific Live Workstation spin > > Sounds like the proper category: will not block a regular Fedora release, > will not consume test resources for primary Fedora deliverables, and will > provide a focus for those with some stake in optical media. > > While lack of community to support an "optical spin" may not mean there > are few who want it, it would mean there are insufficient people who will > invest their talent to create it. All Fedora ISO's start out as ISO 9660, with El Torito extensions added; and GRUB 2 and ISOLINUX to boot UEFI and BIOS systems respectively. The ISO 9660 and El Torito parts are probably pretty statically reliable. The gotcha comes from the ever changing bootloaders, and there are two of them. Even if we standardized on one of them, they're in effect two still, because BIOS and UEFI systems use completely different binary files and boot mechanisms following the El Torito part that enables discovery of the bootloader. So the bottom line is, if we want optical to work, it has to be tested. *shrug* Otherwise there's a chance we run into bugs like this [1] which is an bug only affecting boot when the ISO image is burned onto actual physical optical media, the problem doesn't happen with the same image written to USB sticks. Bolted onto that however, isohybrid adds an MBR, and then also a GPT and APM (yes no kidding three partitions) are added. This is how we boot Macs from optical or USB sticks, and everything else BIOS or UEFI from USB sticks. This is for x86_64, I'm not sure what other archs' ISO's look like. Is there a less fragile way to do all of this? *shrug* It's a very delicately, and eyebrow raising, balanced boat. Maybe the strongest argument for thinning the heard of parts on these ISOs is, it'd be easier to modify a single partition map to bring about persistence to the USB stick, but that just makes us trade problems we know for problems we don't know. There's no net increase in stability, probably. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1148087 -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ test mailing list -- test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to test-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
