Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
1–10 of 233 posts
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#2Yeah it seems like a bad idea
Especially because of:
> Fedora is also installed on cloud servers and virtual machines of various sorts, some of which do not support anything other than booting via BIOS. The proposal noted that the time of the 2020 discussion, Amazon's AWS did not support UEFI, but that has changed. Marc Pervaz Boocha pointed out that many virtual private server (VPS) providers do not support UEFI, giving Linode and Vultr as examples. Dominik "Rathann" Mierzejewski reported that OVH is also affected
(or just running virtualized stuff locally)
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#3The idea was turned down, luckily.
There are too many downside at this point in time.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#4> UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique.
The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable.
I once considered using EFI as a basis for booting some of my bare-metal works, but:
- it requires the GPT partitioning scheme, which in turn requires handling of UUIDs. Their endianess is not little, big - its mixed. mixed in the same value. This is a quirk inherited from Microsoft.
- EFI system partition is the FAT file system, which is an FS that is even older than the legacy BIOS. Many gory details. Legacy from Microsoft.
- EFI "executables" are actually windows executables, who still start with the 'MZ' header from MS-DOS. The real mode code for displaying "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" is, depending on the toolchain, sometimes still included. Also legacy from Microsoft.
I don't see why Linux users should be enthusiastic about adopting this.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#5> UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique. The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable. I once considered usi…
I don't see why Linux users would care about this. It boots the system, nobody cares it uses some old MS tech.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#6> UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique. The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable. I once considered usi…
I don't see why Linux users would care about this. It boots the system, nobody cares it uses some old MS tech.
Because "removing legacy" was one of the key arguments of EFI enthusiasts, and its still plenus bovis stercus.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#7> UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique. The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable. I once considered usi…
Less legacy code for them to maintain. I see that as a win.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#8> UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique. The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable. I once considered usi…
EFI is here, non-specialty Linux distros don't really have the option of not adopting it.
So the choice is between adopting it and keeping BIOS indefinitely, or adopting it and at some point in the future dropping BIOS.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why Linux users would care about this. It boots the system, nobody cares it uses some old MS tech.
Because "removing legacy" was one of the key arguments of EFI enthusiasts, and its still plenus bovis stercus.
"Full of faeces from cows" is and remains vulgar no matter how it's spelled.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#10> UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique. The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable. I once considered usi…
EFI is here, non-specialty Linux distros don't really have the option of not adopting it. So the choice is between adopting it and keeping BIOS indefinitely, or adopting it and at some point in the future dropping BIOS.
False dichotomy: Not picking EFI does not mean keeping BIOS indefinitely.