I see virtual machines as a subset of the myriad of combinations of processor, BIOS, support circuits and motherboards on which Fedora should run. VMs have some significant advantages in terms of convenience, but just as an error observed on "real" hardware might be attributed to a quirk or fault in that platform, so too an error in a VM might be the result of some bug in the implementation of the VM. Virtual machines will increase in importance to Fedora. There exist operating systems that run only in virtual machines. It is interesting to speculate about a future where hardware manufacturers build products that implement a standard virtual architecture, and some descendant of today's Fedora runs just on that virtual platform, but this is not in our near future. Conclusion: virtual machines are valid and valuable tools useful to develop and test software. Errors observed in a VM environment should be reported in the same way as errors on bare hardware, and should be subjected to the same triage process that might elevate them to "critical" status because they seriously impact operation on many (real or virtual) platforms, or reduce them to "future consideration" status because they have little impact, they occur only on platforms rare enough to suggest a quirk or platform fault is their cause, or simply because it is impossible to find the platform resources necessary to investigate the problem. Of course, but that is not the only configuration that should be tested.

On Sat, 2010-06-12 at 22:02 -0400, Bob Lightfoot wrote: It's always better to test in a VM than not at all. We would like to have at least some of us running on real hardware, though, because there are bugs you just won't catch in a VM. In most cases yes. If you're doing a specific test whose primary purpose is to check something about the media - such as whether you can successfully perform an installation from it - we'd definitely need a test of 'the real thing'. Ideally those tests should in fact be run *both* ways - we'd want to make sure you can install from the DVD ISO both burned to a DVD and mounted as a DVD drive inside a VM (using the Fedora virt stack, of course), for instance. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net