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Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

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Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#71

Post by bigpod »

while fedora defenetly is not my cup of tea, first thing i do when i get a new system(desktop or laptop) is disable legacy bios/CSM whatever it is labeled as. This is to prevent mirriad of issus BIOS brings including its horrible MBR. GPT is million times better and for someone who dual boots on many machines (and has a drive with 14 different operating systems as a test) to all you legacy BIOS and MBR fans MBR doesnt cut it and is cause of many headaches if you dual boot.

Remember how some people have had issues with windows destroying booting of linux that is due to MBR being a useless piece of antiquated software and breaking. It wasnt windows's fault its just that its update utility had to overwrite a part of MBR and since MBR was already basically a house of cards all you had to do to break it is have a little mishap and your linux boot is gone (it was same on other side just less people were crying about it because well they blamed windows for breaking itself)

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#72

Post by pabs3 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #55
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.

Seems there are two such projects for that:

https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibmtpm20tss/

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#73

Post by adrian_b »

mjg59 wrote: post #33
blueflow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. I'm waiting for something else, until then, we'll stick with BIOS. Supporting EFI means implementing more legacy cruft than we already have with BIOS.

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.

Except for some embedded computers with Atom CPUs and some enterprise-oriented laptops, I have not seen any systems without legacy BIOS compatibility.

Nevertheless, the option to enable the legacy BIOS booting can be quite hard to find in the BIOS menus, which may deceive many into believing that a system does not support legacy BIOS booting, even when it actually does support it.

On work computers belonging to a company, the BIOS configuration may be locked, so it might not be possible for the users to enable legacy BIOS booting.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#74

Post by bigpod »

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…

honestly at some point we should think about deprecating old code old stuff and i think 10 years might not be such a bad number, of course good deprecation policy would tell you for few releases before that something will get removed but its linux so even if they said we are removing BIOS support in fedora 40 everyone would cry

also it takes about same amount of code to boot BIOS and UEFI

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#75

Post by AshamedCaptain »

pabs3 wrote: post #72
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems there are two such projects for that: https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibmtpm20tss/

I mean "in a way that would allow you to boot Windows on top of it".

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#76

Post by Foxboron »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #64
Foxboron wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "scar…

>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.

Not really?

Several popular Linux distributions simply do not support Secure Boot. Arch Linux is one of them.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#77

Post by pabs3 »

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.…

The majority of x86 computers I have are BIOS only, only one of them is UEFI and I only have it because I found it discarded on the side of the road. I don't use the UEFI mode though, since my current install doesn't support booting in UEFI mode (no GPT) and wouldn't support booting in BIOS mode if I switched it to GPT and UEFI.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#78

Post by TZubiri »

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…

"Is this corporate influence?"

Of course? Fedora Linux is an asset of the company Red Hat, their prevailing revenue model seems to have something to do with adding their own brand of complexity to otherwise simple open source systems, see systemd.

Since its acquisition by IBM (NYSE:IBM), Red Hat has entered the conglomerate of publicly owned companies, their profits are linked together with other public hardware manufacturers like Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), through intraday traders and index funds.

In summary, removing support for older hardware increases sale of new hardware, hardware and software companies coordinate profit sharing through stock markets. Pretty simple.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#79

Post by doubled112 »

adrian_b wrote: post #73
mjg59 wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

Except for some embedded computers with Atom CPUs and some enterprise-oriented laptops, I have not seen any systems without legacy BIOS compatibility. Nevertheless, the option to enable the legacy BIOS booting can be quite hard to find in the BIOS menus, which may deceive many into believing that a system does not support legacy BIOS booting, even when it actually does support it. On work computers belonging to a com…

I have a couple of AMD ASUS Vivobooks that don’t have CSM/BIOS boot available

Never noticed until I wanted to boot memtest.

It’s possible that I missed it, but Google results didn’t look promising either.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#80

Post by bigpod »

nemetroid wrote: post #27

I understand the need to get around some of the quirks inherent in BIOS, but the idea of rich pre-OS applications just seems completely backwards. The goal for the early boot environment should be to hand off to the real operating system as soon as possible. Just let me select which disk partition to boot from and the operating system will take it from there, thanks.

its all about UX, if you have an environment that has lots of menus and settings something even bios had to control certien aspects of your system like virtualization support and such you would like to have good UX, because of that UEFI was created. Now if you wanted to do that from OS you can but you need a technology many people hate and want to remove from their systems and hardware called Management Engine. Yes this is the purpose of ME allow changing of UEFI settings from either the OS of machine itself or changing of UEFI settings from another machine without requirement of IPMI(idrac iLo and simular implementations) and rebooting to get to it. Implementation of some sort of ME allows you to overclock your CPU from OS. So AMD has some sort of ME(of course its not called ME since that is just name of intel implementation) as well(how wide in functionality is another question) so do GPUs.
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