[OpenIndiana-discuss] The kiss of death

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

John D Groenveld <groenveld at acm.org> asks today

>> Can you install from the latest installation media on that PC?
>> <URL:http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/>

There are a lot of recent discussions on this list about installation
problems on particular hardware systems, but not a much mention of
routine test installations on virtualization hypervisors, like bhyve,
Parallels, OVirt/QEMU, virt-manager/QEMU, VirtualBox, VMware ESX, and
Xen.

At my site, we have a test farm with hundreds of VMs, primarily on
OVirt and virt-manager, with one small system capable of supporting
just one or two simultaneous VMs on VirtualBox.

I have had at least 8 instances of various releases of OpenIndiana and
Hipster, plus more VMS with the relatives OmniOS, OmniTribblix,
Sun/Oracle Solaris, Tribblix, Unleashed, and XstreamOS, mostly on the
QEMU-based hypervisors.

Several classes of installer bugs have afflicted some of the VMs that
we run, or have tried to install:

(a) uncontrollable streaming garbage input on the console device,
    making correct typein almost impossible;

(b) black screen-of-death on the console at boot time;

(c) random patterns of green and red lines on the console (hiding all
    text);

(d) failure of the mouse to track the screen cursor, sometimes showing
    two cursors, one of which cannot reach certain portions of the
    screen;

(e) installer screens with critical buttons lying off the visible
    console screen, and no resizing possible;

(f) boot wait times that are too short to get to the BIOS setup before
    booting starts (on OVirt, it can take 20 to 30 seconds after a
    power-on before the console is visible, by which time a lot of
    early output is lost).

Are openindiana developers on this list willing to post a list of VMs
on which candidate ISO images have been tested before end users try to
install them on physical machines?

It seems to me that such testing should be normal these days, given
the extreme low cost of virtualization --- I personally run more than
80 VMs simultaneously on each of my home and campus office
workstations.

I will make an effort over the next few days to try some of the latest
ISO images from the Web site above on some of our virtualization
platforms.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
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