Re: 5.18 vmwgfx seems to break booting VirtualBox VMs

From: Zack Rusin <zackr@vmware.com>
To: Thorsten Leemhuis <regressions@leemhuis.info>
Cc: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>,
	"dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org"
	<dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org>,
	"regressions@lists.linux.dev" <regressions@lists.linux.dev>,
	Linux-graphics-maintainer <Linux-graphics-maintainer@vmware.com>
Subject: Re: 5.18 vmwgfx seems to break booting VirtualBox VMs
Date: Tue, 10 May 2022 12:26:04 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <5F7AE997-3B4A-4E62-A1F7-ADC80D4EE0DB@vmware.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3d8f7aa0-0846-436d-7fe1-e8f8af7eaff5@leemhuis.info>

> On May 10, 2022, at 7:06 AM, Thorsten Leemhuis <regressions@leemhuis.info> wrote:
> 
> Hi, this is your Linux kernel regression tracker.
> 
> On 10.05.22 02:12, Zack Rusin wrote:
>>> On May 9, 2022, at 6:57 AM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
>>> wrote: On 4/11/22 16:24, Zack Rusin wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 2022-04-11 at 10:52 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Fedora has received a bug report here:
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbugzilla.redhat.com%2Fshow_bug.cgi%3Fid%3D2072556&amp;data=05%7C01%7Czackr%40vmware.com%7C2dca2a7c731c42c9cdc608da327534e3%7Cb39138ca3cee4b4aa4d6cd83d9dd62f0%7C0%7C0%7C637877776243955067%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=iN4JPTRDJaUqU%2FciQSCdGWg45yDA8iZEAyKBWB80IZ4%3D&amp;reserved=0
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
> That Fedora rawhide VMs no longer boot under the VirtualBox
>>>>> hypervisor after the VM has been updated to a 5.18-rc# kernel.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Switching the emulated GPU from vmwaregfx to VirtualBoxSVGA
>>>>> fixes this, so this seems to be a vmwgfx driver regression.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Note I've not investigated/reproduced this myself due to
>>>>> -ENOTIME.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we do not support
>>>> vmwgfx on VirtualBox. I'd be happy to review patches related to
>>>> this, but it's very unlikely we'd have to time to look at this
>>>> ourselves.
>>> 
>>> I somewhat understand where you are coming from, but this is not 
>>> how the kernels "no regressions" policy works.
> 
> Hans, many thx for writing your mail, I once intended to write something
> similar, but then forgot about it. :-/
> 
>>> For the end user a regression is a regression and as maintainers we
>>> are supposed to make sure any regressions noticed are fixed before
>>> a new kernel hits end user's systems.
>> 
>> I think there’s a misunderstanding here - the vmwgfx driver never
>> supported VirtualBox. VirtualBox implementation of the svga device
>> lacks a bunch of features,
> 
> Which from the kernel's point of view is irrelevant. If the Linux
> kernel's vmwgfx driver ever supported the VirtualBox implementation then
> things shouldn't regress with later versions.

It never did. vmwgfx is just a driver for VMware's SVGA device, it never supported anything else. 

z