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Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

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Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#61

Post by faho »

adrian_b wrote: post #53
faho wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exc…

1. They no longer need to package bios bootloaders

2. They no longer need to support bios booting in the forums - no asking "how do you boot this? Bios, EFI? Have you tried the other?", no telling people "EFI is required for feature X"

3. They no longer need to maintain the bios boot documentation

4. They no longer need to maintain the bios path in the installer/boot media

5. They no longer need to test the bios paths (or hope they don't break and be ashamed if they don't)

6. This makes it easier to switch to a EFI-only default bootloader (instead of Grub 2, which can do both)

Is this massive? No, it's possible to keep maintaining BIOS support. But it's not just freeing space on the package mirrors either.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#62

Post by AshamedCaptain »

mjg59 wrote: post #31

My short summary of this: pretty much every x86 client system since 2012 has shipped with working UEFI support (because Microsoft required it for new Windows 8 systems), and from a compatibility perspective Linux works Just Fine with basically all of them. Servers took a little longer (HP, especially, wanted to do things like just add GPT support to their BIOS implementation), but even that's in a good position now.…

Drawing the line at 10 years old is ... way too close for comfort. I could understand to drop i386 because it basically amounts to another entire architecture, and besides it seems with i386 you are also generally RAM limited which makes it harder to use a recent DE.

But a 10 year old computer is perfectly capable of running even the latest version of the heavy-est DEs.

Also, "working UEFI supports" means working enough to boot Windows and not much else. Kernel bugzilla still has lots of UEFI bugs open for early UEFI firmware, and even not-so-early UEFI firmware (cough efi=no_disable_early_pci_dma ).

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#63

Post by adrian_b »

Schopenhauer01 wrote: post #7
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…

Less legacy code for them to maintain. I see that as a win.

Fedora does not maintain any code related to legacy BIOS booting.

That is done by the maintainers of the bootloader packages.

What Fedora presumably intends is to remove all bootloader packages from the installation image.

In that case, the Linux kernel can be booted only by using its included EFI stub.

One less package in the installation image might be claimed to imply less maintenance work for Fedora, but in any case such maintenance work has nothing to do with the work done for maintaining legacy code.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#64

Post by AshamedCaptain »

Foxboron wrote: post #49
ulzeraj wrote: post #18

Nothing 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.

They also do this because it is likely that Microsoft will stop signing their bootloaders/kernels with their UEFI CA keys if they allow arbitrary user modules to be loaded (because it would be trivial to abuse those kernels to break Windows' full disk encryption).

And if Microsoft stops signing your bootloaders it is an automatic death sentence for your distribution, as you can no longer boot the LiveCD without "scary prompts" and/or fiddling with the BIOS setup.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#65

Post by anothernewdude »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #24

Oh 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…

It's Red Hat, they dropped their support for community based linux. Why wouldn't they also drop support for old hardware.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#66

Post by willis936 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #24

Oh 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…

Yes Fedora is "a distribution of linux". A distribution that is an upstream of an enterprise distribution. Why do you care if enterprise markets don't care about legacy support? Just use another distribution. That's one of the boons of linux.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#67

Post by anthk »

mjg59 wrote: post #40
tremon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't just "boot the system". The full EFI specification includes support for runtime services, i.e. proprietary code that keeps running even after your FLOSS operating system has booted. That's something Linux users should care about: it provides a backdoor for clinging to closed-source drivers on a pretend-open platform. There's already been proof-of-concept EFI viruses, it's only a matter of time until the fi…

The UEFI runtime services provide functionality that is not generically exposed through any other OS environment. Linux could just refuse to provide those runtime features, and things would roughly work[1] - we'd still need to call some UEFI features in the boot stub, but the same is true of BIOS (look at what the 16-bit code does in terms of obtaining information that the kernel uses after init). If you want to drop…

Even back in the BIOS days Linux overrode lots of BIOS stuff such as partition size limits once it booted.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#68

Post by anthk »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #50
8K832d7tNmiQ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

You can use several GNU/Linux distros which support BIOSes, even libre ones.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#69

Post by op00to »

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…

You don’t like it because Microsoft has a hand in developing the standard?

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#70

Post by brobinson »

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…

Ventoy can do this: small EFI partition with keys you can enroll in SecureBoot and a fat second partition you drop all your ISOs onto.
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