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Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

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Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#121

Post by nix23 »

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…

Yeah it's funny, my workstation is a 12yo HP-Z600 workstation upgraded for like 30$ to 2CPU's/16Cores and 47GB Ecc-Ram, and now someone tells me it's retro but it's still often faster than new Hardware.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#122

Post by AreYouSirius »

chasil wrote: post #100
bigpod wrote: post #71

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 doesn…

Recovering mbr boot corruption on CentOS is relatively easy. Boot from the install media in rescue mode, chroot into /mnt/sysimage, then grub2-install onto /dev/sda. I've never had to do this outside of the redhat realm, but the procedure is not complex after a few rounds to commit it to memory.

No post body was provided.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#123

Post by userbinator »

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.…

Linux works Just Fine with basically all of them.

Do you remember this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#124

Post by mwcampbell »

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.

> the idea of rich pre-OS applications just seems completely backwards.

is at odds with:

> let me select which disk partition to boot from

As soon as there's any UI at all, one has to deal with much of the complexity of modern UI. For one thing, I'm sure modern firmware has to support modern HID input devices, such as USB keyboards. But also, ideally, that UI should be accessible to people who can't use a minimal screen-and-keyboard UI implementation, such as blind people. This is an area where, even with UEFI, PCs fall short. I like the way Apple has resolved this on its Apple Silicon Macs [1]. As I understand it, as soon as the Mac has to display any UI at boot time, it boots into a minimal version of macOS itself, where VoiceOver and any other accessibility tool can run.

I agree, though, that in the common case where the default OS is booted, the path from power-on to OS kernel should be as short as practical. Booting into a BIOS in 8086 emulation mode hardly seems like the best way to do this. But then, a design-by-committee solution like UEFI might not be optimal either. It pains me somewhat to say this, but Apple's proprietary, vertically integrated solution might be near optimal.

[1]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#125

Post by BeefWellington »

This is a bit of a tone deaf idea to explore right now. If anything, the environment and chip shortage issues should be pushing people to promise extending support for older systems for another decade.

That said, while there are loads of systems out there that could still use BIOS, I like to look at the second hand market.

There are a lot of Dell R710s for sale on eBay still (700+ listings). These are commonly suggested as a good "intro to homelabbing" server in a variety of places. These systems were released in 2009, often featuring CPUs from 2007-2008. They support UEFI 2.1.

Contrasting this, some UEFI implementations are horrifically buggy and largely seem designed to only work with Windows.

I think 10 years is probably too close a cutoff but I do think that eventually it becomes a lot more work to maintain it (like i386 builds, x32 builds, etc.) and becomes not worth it except for niche distros.

If we factor in things like environmental impact, it makes a great deal more sense to continue to support older systems for some longer period of time.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#126

Post by spicybright »

anthk wrote: post #68
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I agree, and that's the strength of linux, but here's a slight devils advocate:

If someone is heavily invested into RH for their BIOS only infra, this could be an issue for them. I'm sure there's large operations that would need fixing up if these change happens.

Not that RH is obligated to cater fully to that crowed of course. But 10 years is a bit silly, especially with how expensive hardware is now due to covid.

All that said, it's not going to be an issue like everyone is making it out to be.

Individuals should have few problems forking mainline to keep BIOS support, and large organizations will be given amble time to upgrade (at least years. RH isn't stupid with it's corporate customers.)

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#127

Post by eklitzke »

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…

From the article:

> Intel stopped shipping the last vestiges of BIOS support in 2020 (as have other vendors, and Apple and Microsoft), so this is clearly the way things are heading - and therefore aligns with Fedora's "First" objective.

You may not have seen many computers yet without legacy BIOS compatibility but this is going to be the norm for new computers very soon.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#128

Post by GoblinSlayer »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #104
blueflow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its relevant for converting them from and to their string representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...

Interesting link, thanks, I wasn't aware of that. The link seems to suggest that the odd mixed-endian string representation ("Variant 2") is now quite rare. With the one that's more common ("Variant 1"), I'd say that I *slightly* disagree that representing the byte sequence 99,aa,bb,cc as 99aabbcc is "big endian". If you don't philosphically think of the latter as a number, then it's just the bytes written out compac…

Variant is a very abstract concept mostly for humans, programs pay no attention to it and serialize all kinds of UUID the same way.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#129

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

>a Linux distribution

I think it matters quite a lot that the distro in question is Fedora which is by design forward looking and kind of a testbed. They have been shipping Wayland as a default since 2016 when it still had countless of hardware and software problems. Part of the diversity of the linux ecosystem is that distros can be opinionated.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#130

Post by zaolin »

The whole step moving forward into the UEFI direction on Client Computing Systems (laptops, desktop) is the right way.

Even if I dislike the UEFI specification and existing implementations, the spec is more than 24 years old. It might fulfill its purpose as a bootloader/OS interface.

The UEFI BDS interface, the one the most people see and the operating system interfaces, is now standardized for many operating systems and OEMs, making it easier to integrate and maintain. It is finally possible to use standard security mechanisms (verified, measured boot) to secure your device. So we can use such technologies to ensure device security reasonably as we do in my corp www.immu.ne

The custom certificate provisioning is a mess and hard to use, but that can be possibly made easy by projects like: https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

I don't believe the UEFI interface is beneficial for data-center or embedded devices. The UEFI BDS interface was developed for client platforms and required physical presence. It leads to complexity in the DC and embedded world. I feel a more suitable approach would be www.linuxboot.org which is already used by many Hyperscalers and Embedded companies.

That's my 50 cents about the story. My background, I am coreboot developer and security architect.

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