[OpenIndiana-discuss] The kiss of death

[Reginald Beardsley]

 There are very few developers. As a consequence responsibility for testing must fall on the regular user community. It should in any case for the simple reason that installation on physical hardware is more of an issue than on a VM and no one can support very many physical machines. I have a single Z400 set up to allow testing OS installs to old disks using a trayless SATA socket.

The point of starting this thread is to formalize a review process by the user community of a release candidate before the release is formalized. The list of systems on which a release has been tested should be in the release notes along with the name of the person who did the testing.

I got started on testing when what I thought would be a routine install of 2020.10 to a 5 TB disk found that gparted dumped core. So I started looking for other issues.

This is why my extensive testing of the ISO images John linked which I have been referring to as 2021.04_rc1.

The only way this can work is to post release candidates which are tested by the user community, issues logged and when those issues have been fixed another RC is created and the testing repeated. When all the issues found have been verified as fixed it becomes an official release with a list of the systems used in testing in the release notes. Semiannual releases which break things that were working is not conducive to the survival of OI. Gparted works on the 2017.10 ISO, but dumps core on 2020.10. That can not be allowed to happen. Better no release than one that has obvious major flaws.

Reg



On Wednesday, April 21, 2021, 10:14:00 PM CDT, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:


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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- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
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