Bug 855824

Proposing as F18 Alpha blocker:
" The boot menu for all installation images should include an entry which causes both installation and the installed system to use a generic, highly compatible video driver (such as 'vesa'). This mechanism should work correctly, launching the installer and attempting to use the generic driver "
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_18_Alpha_Release_Criteria

Created attachment 611390 [details]
Xorg log

I have tried this on bare metal (intel graphics) and it doesn't happen - vesa is used correctly. This might only influence VMs. (I'll try machines with amd/nvidia hardware as soon as I can).

The severity of this problem is therefore probably much lower (we might not care about VMs as much/at all?).

Discussed at 2012-09-10 QA meeting, acting as a blocker review meeting. We believe what's happening here is this. The menu entry in question passes two parameters: "nomodeset xdriver=vesa". It seems the 'xdriver=vesa' part of this isn't being honored. However, the 'nomodeset' part - which disables kernel modesetting - will result in the vesa driver being used in any case, on almost all hardware, as most X drivers no longer have userland modesetting code, so when kernel modesetting is disabled, X will not use the native driver and will fall back to vesa instead.

So even though there's a bug here, in practice the menu entry will have the intended effect on almost all real hardware, only KVMs are affected by it. Since it's easy enough to workaround this in a KVM case, it's rejected as a blocker.

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