The idea was turned down, luckily. There are too many downside at this point in time.
No post body was provided.
Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
41–50 of 233 posts
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#42> 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…
> UUIDs ... endianess is not little, big - its mixed. mixed in the same value UUIDs do not have any endianness. They are just a sequence of individual bytes. It's true that some ways of generating UUIDs work by using the bytes of longer numbers, which I can believe use mixed endianness (I don't know them well enough to remember myself). But no one should be relying on that when reading UUIDs back out, except maybe fo…
Its relevant for converting them from and to their string representation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is literally not an option - systems have shipped without BIOS compatibility for a long time now, so refusing to support UEFI is just not an option.
Quoted post unavailable.
I don't think that's going to result in everyone shipping UEFI without BIOS compatibility suddenly changing their mind.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#44UEFI emulation is a thing. For people with legacy-only firmware systems, you too can run UEFI on lazy cloud providers and legacy hardware. I do this on my 14 year old dell laptop just so that all my x86_64 systems have the same boot efistub linux kernel images. All you need is to use one of the EDK DUET bootloader builds such as BootDuet¹, or for an easier user experience CloverBootloader². Only complaint is securebo…
> But I imagine with Windows 11 around the corner requiring TPMs (which might require emulation on older hardware that doesn't have it) and secureboot, UEFI firmware emulators with these feature will probably get more popular and more accessible.
Unfortunately, there's no appetite - there's no point since that in a significant break Windows 11 only runs on new processors that happens to have both UEFI and TPM (not always enabled by default but it's there).
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#45Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
False dichotomy: Not picking EFI does not mean keeping BIOS indefinitely.
What replacement do you propose, then? Especially what replacement do you propose that works with the kind of typical hardware that non-specialty linux distros like Fedora want to support? Intel systems make up a large chunk of the hardware Fedora is used on, and as far as I can tell they're all-in on EFI. So Fedora has to use EFI to be able to boot on Intel systems.
I have encountered various embedded computers which no longer have the legacy BIOS boot option, so using EFI is indeed necessary.
However, the vast majority of server or desktop motherboards and of laptops still have the option for legacy BIOS booting, even if the option may be difficult to find in the BIOS menus.
I have about a dozen servers, desktops and laptops and I have configured all of them to use legacy BIOS booting, because EFI booting does not have any advantage, only disadvantages.
It would have been very easy to replace the ugly legacy BIOS booting method with a simple and clean method for booting, but unfortunately those who made the EFI specification have failed to achieve this goal.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#47> 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…
- previously, x86 MBR-style partition tables (which were the only thing really supported in Linux) gave you no strong semantic information about what a partition was[1]. GPT may involve GUIDs, but in the grand scheme of things that's a small part of the cost of mounting stuff. - FAT is old, and FAT is well-supported by basically anything, and what features do you want in the partition that contains your bootloader th…
> what features do you want in the partition that contains your bootloader that FAT doesn't support?
Well, I'd love to be able to drop a bunch of 8GB (notably FAT doesn't support files this big) LiveDVD disk images on a bare file system and see them in the computer's built-in boot-menu immediately. I already enjoy the fact I don't need a traditional boot loader (like GRUB) to handle multi-OS as I can have 2 independent EFI boot partitions (one for Windows and one for Linux) and use the computer's boot menu too choose which to boot from.
Ideally the whole OS should be just a read-only boot image and a traditional partition should only be used for config/data files IMHO.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#48> 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…
- previously, x86 MBR-style partition tables (which were the only thing really supported in Linux) gave you no strong semantic information about what a partition was[1]. GPT may involve GUIDs, but in the grand scheme of things that's a small part of the cost of mounting stuff. - FAT is old, and FAT is well-supported by basically anything, and what features do you want in the partition that contains your bootloader th…
> previously, x86 MBR-style partition tables (which were the only thing really supported in Linux) gave you no strong semantic information about what a partition was[1]
LVM appears to solve this issue as well as the related issue of only supporting a limited number of partitions in BIOS.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#49Nothing against EFI but secure boot as it is is a pain in the ass. Want to install some kernel module to enjoy your Xbox controller? Too bad you need to follow this convoluted guide about generating and installing certificates to sign your driver... or just disable the whole secure boot thingie. Its like selinux hardware edition.
This is a misnormer though. Secure Boot and kernel modules are not inherently dependent on each other. However modern Linux distribution carry out-of-tree patches which throws the Secure Boot keys into the Linux platform keyring and enforce lockdown mode.
This isn't a thing on the stock kernel.
Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
#50Oh god. So after Windows drops support basically for any PC that is 4 years old, a Linux distribution entertains the idea to follow closely and drop support for any PC that is 10 years old? Is this corporate influence? I cannot believe BIOS boot support is even close to the amount of code required for UEFI boot. Before you say "UEFI is much older than 10 years old", please remember that UEFI only started being a defa…
Look, even if RHEL 10 gonna drop UEFI support maybe sometime in the future, there's gonna be some retro enthusiats who would happily fork it with BIOS support returned. Also, why are you so focused with corporate decision of a distro that is obviously cattered for future devices?
"10 year old hardware" is retro ? Ivy Bridge is retro these days?
This hardware is not just usable, it is _perfectly usable_, up to the point you'd barely distinguish it Gnome-performance-wise from something from last year if you pair with an SSD (which is not so strange).
This is not a 486 with 4megs of RAM that requires a special DE. These are machines with many gigs of RAM that have graphic cards which are still better than some of today's low-end cards. If any change like this is ever accepted, drawing the support line at "10 year old hardware", it's going to be hard to ever again claim that Linux is good for the environment.