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Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

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Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#51

Post by zozbot234 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
mjg59 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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 independe…

> notably FAT doesn't support files this big

ExFAT can support those. You could also use the UDF file system.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#52

Post by guerrilla »

I understand why this stuff usually bothers people but I think this makes for Fedora specifically... they're popular and bleeding-edge, so they want to work on the latest popular hardware and not cater to minorities. If a hacker needs different, there's other distros and DIY, if a company needs different then they can just invest in maintenance of that themselves. Yeah, EFI sucks bad and we should be working to replace it with something that's free/open and actually good but this is the environment we're actually operate in and being in denial of that doesn't help anyone.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#53

Post by adrian_b »

faho wrote: post #26
tremon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenFirmware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware Many systems get by just fine with a minimal ELF or multiboot loader and a firmware-provided devicetree specification. Dynamic hardware enumeration is performed by every OS anyway, the only hardware that must be initialized is the bootloader/kernel storage. For the x86 platform, this could be implemented via coreboot (libreboot always reads to me as lib-reboot…

Do you propose that Fedora not support EFI and tell its users to replace the firmare or only buy devices with that? That would be a massive step backwards in hardware support. Like I said: They don't really have the option of not supporting EFI. Alternatively they can support EFI and OpenFirmware, but that increases the number of supported paths instead of decreasing them.

Actually I do not understand which is the problem of Fedora in this case.

The distribution needs to do almost nothing to support either EFI or the legacy BIOS or any other booting method.

That is the job of a bootloader package, not of the Linux distribution. For example I am using syslinux as the bootloader for all my computers, while grub is another example of a frequently used bootloader (but which seems to be excessively complex in comparison with syslinux).

I assume that by supporting only EFI Fedora means that they will remove all bootloaders from their installation image, so that the Linux kernel will be launched by its EFI stub.

I do not know about other bootloaders, but an installed syslinux package occupies only a few megabytes, maybe 10 megabytes at most, so deleting it cannot provide much space for anything else.

I cannot see how deleting a bootloader package may be claimed to be a significant simplification for the maintenance effort of the Fedora distribution.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#54

Post by blueflow »

zozbot234 wrote: post #51
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 independe…

> notably FAT doesn't support files this big ExFAT can support those. You could also use the UDF file system.

ExFAT is not supported by EFI.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#55

Post by AshamedCaptain »

iod wrote: post #32

UEFI 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…

I don't think you can emulate a TPM via software. You need a hook in the firmware and use SystemManagementMode/SMM, very likely.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#56

Post by mjg59 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
mjg59 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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 independe…

That's a reasonable desire, but it's also not something that's supported by traditional BIOS - UEFI isn't any worse in this respect

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#57

Post by qwerty456127 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #51
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 independe…

> notably FAT doesn't support files this big ExFAT can support those. You could also use the UDF file system.

But ExFAT lacks the FAT's virtues of being universally supported and royalty-free, yet still is a very dumb FS with no journal (which means unreliable) and no extended attributes (which means data-metadata separation impossible) so I don't see a reason for it to exist anywhere outside severely resource-limited embedded applications. I would rather use Ext4 everywhere for everything. Is the problem preventing wide adoption of Ext4 GPL?

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#58

Post by pja »

jaclaz wrote: post #14
blueflow wrote: post #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 usi…

Only for the record, I don't know in Linux, but on windows (at least up to 10) it is perfectly possible to use MBR partitioned media to boot in UEFI (i.e. even if generally speaking GPT is "tied" to UEFI, GPT partitioning is not a requisite unless a greater than 4TB mass storage with 512 bytes/sector is used, 4K disks are generally not bootable for a number of operating systems, but they are rare anyway as boot media…

IIRC Windows 11 will no longer boot from MBR partitions & you have to convert them to GPT.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#59

Post by zozbot234 »

froh wrote: post #9
blueflow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's nothing "vulgar" whatsoever about cow dung. It is an eco-friendly, renewable material and commonly used for many sacred rituals in India.
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