[OpenIndiana-discuss] The kiss of death

[Austin Kim]

On Apr 21, 2021, at 11:13 PM, 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.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
> - University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
> - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
> - 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
> - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
> ———————————————————————————————————————
> 
Was reading Appendix A:  “MakeIndex” of Leslie Lamport’s _LaTeX:  A Document Preparation System_, second edition (which somehow perennially outlives the Tower of Babel of documentation and markup languages that seem to come into and out of vogue every year) when I saw your post pop up in my inbox and my eyes did a double-take!

Like a blindfolded chess-master playing multiple amateurs in round-robin fashion, I think the sheer passion and dedication of the OI developers often mask the fact that there are actually a small number of people doing an impossibly enormous amount of work (at least as far as I can tell from GitHub commits), all the more remarkable considering that unlike the BSDs there is no Foundation providing any financial, logistical, or organizational support for their efforts (apart from hosting and upstream sources from the illumos project).

One possible solution might be to do what some of the BSDs do and set up a Wiki page with an architecture × platform grid where OI users who have had successful installs out in the field can document which version of OI they got to work on which architecture/platform combination (possibly with notes, _e. g._, on which graphics cards or disk controllers they tested).

Like Amdahl’s Law, when the number of developers is constrained, it makes sense to focus those development resources on those use cases and subsystems where OpenIndiana is used most of the time.  (I’m admittedly biased here because OpenIndiana isn’t an option on the IBM PowerPC 970*-based Apple Power Mac G5s that I use as my personal machines, so my personal use case for OI is solely as a server OS.)

And thank you so much for all your work over the years on MakeIndex and *TeX!  The only reason more people around the world don’t reach out to you to thank you is I suspect that most people don’t know whom to thank :)

Austin

“We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible.”  —Allan Massie, _A Question of Loyalties_, 1989