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Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

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Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#211

Post by li2uR3ce »

BeefWellington wrote: post #125

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 sugges…

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

I have lots of UEFI hardware with never-to-be-fixed bugs that are mitigated by just using BIOS boot. These are from Dell and Supermicro.

The Dells when set for UEFI would boot 50% of the time and 100% of the time in BIOS mode. The workaround was well known and is the only reasonable thing to do. It's EOL from dell it will never be patched.

The Supermicro's would work great in UEFI but the factory default was BIOS boot. The trouble is that these particular systems had a reasonably high chance of loosing BIOS setup data if they took a power hit (APC UPS are complete garbage FWIW). We'd have to send someone to a remote location to switch it back to UEFI or just reinstall in BIOS mode. By default they would remarkably turn back on when the power was restored and would recover fine if they could boot.

This stuff isn't useless or even THAT old. It's just unreliable in UEFI mode. While most newer stuff from these brands have more reliable UEFI, we're going to keep using hardware that is good enough. We work around hardware/firmware problems because there's nothing out there that doesn't have quirks. "Old" hardware has known quirks that have workarounds that have already been "paid for" with expended labor. New hardware has new quirks that you have to pay off.

Of course it's all moot for this discussion as we don't use rolling quirk factories like Fedora.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#212

Post by wing-_-nuts »

dralley wrote: post #208
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up last week. Vlc and celluloid were crashing under gnome. They worked under swaywm but couldn't find a way to install a redshift wayland clone that worked. There are a whole lot of things that still simply 'don't work' especially if you venture outside of gnome and kde.

If you were using GNOME, then it has a redshift clone built in.

Yes, gnome has night light, but unfortunately vlc crashes under wayland and it takes the entire OS with it. I haven't discovered any smoking guns, but I assume it's some sort of OOM issue, which is funny on a system with 8GB of ram.

Switching to gnome on xorg, it's rock solid stable.

I will wait to switch back to wayland when I'm forced to a few years down the line. I'm done bleeding on the edge.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#213

Post by dralley »

Scramblejams wrote: post #181

In my admittedly limited time using Linux (switched to it full-time in ~2001), the total amount of effort I've spent troubleshooting issues has probably been dominated by two categories: 1. Getting audio to behave. 2. Boot problems. (waves at LILO) I don't know enough details about how UEFI and BIOS and MBR and GRUB and all of this works -- which probably contributed to my difficulties. But the problems certainly did…

> Apple gets to use firmware and only worries about one type of OS,

And a very, very narrow set of potential hardware compared to the entire PC ecosystem.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#214

Post by wing-_-nuts »

taifleh wrote: post #199
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up last week. Vlc and celluloid were crashing under gnome. They worked under swaywm but couldn't find a way to install a redshift wayland clone that worked. There are a whole lot of things that still simply 'don't work' especially if you venture outside of gnome and kde.

VLC doesn’t support wayland. It’s an X application. take a look at https://arewewaylandyet.com/ to find some alternative app for your X-only software Also make sure to alias vlc to your new alternative, i keep forgetting i don’t have vlc installed anymore...

I tired using celluloid which is a gnome wrapper around mpv, but it stopped working. Running it on the command line, I'm prompted with an exception and admonished that wayland support is 'experimental' and known to be unstable.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#215

Post by dralley »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #212
dralley wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were using GNOME, then it has a redshift clone built in.

Yes, gnome has night light, but unfortunately vlc crashes under wayland and it takes the entire OS with it. I haven't discovered any smoking guns, but I assume it's some sort of OOM issue, which is funny on a system with 8GB of ram. Switching to gnome on xorg, it's rock solid stable. I will wait to switch back to wayland when I'm forced to a few years down the line. I'm done bleeding on the edge.

> vlc crashes under wayland and it takes the entire OS with it. I haven't discovered any smoking guns, but I assume it's some sort of OOM issue

As someone already pointed out, VLC doesn't support wayland natively, so it's running under Xwayland. Ironically the issue could very well be X related.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#216

Post by blueflow »

howinteresting wrote: post #161
scrollaway wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider to this debate, you’re the hostile party. You’re replying with name calling to someone who gave you a respectful and detailed answer.

blueflow's favorites list is remarkably revealing.

i fixed it! thanks for reminding me.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#217

Post by forty »

StillBored wrote: post #175
asveikau wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only snag is swap, which I don't believe can be on a subvolume. Linux can make swap a regular file, even. It doesn't need to be a partition. Google result shows: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap#Swap_file

And its something you want to do for security reasons anyway, since linux by default isn't encrypting swap partitions. Putting swap on an LUKs encrypted partition is a bit of a PITA but allows one to hibernate/resume without fear that ones private keys end up in plaintext stored on a disk.

And relevant to OP, you cannot hibernate on Linux with secure boot enabled, I think precisely because Linux doesn't know how to sign/encrypt the RAM dump (no idea how it's actually called)

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#218

Post by sph »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #214
taifleh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC doesn’t support wayland. It’s an X application. take a look at https://arewewaylandyet.com/ to find some alternative app for your X-only software Also make sure to alias vlc to your new alternative, i keep forgetting i don’t have vlc installed anymore...

I tired using celluloid which is a gnome wrapper around mpv, but it stopped working. Running it on the command line, I'm prompted with an exception and admonished that wayland support is 'experimental' and known to be unstable.

I use celluloid on Wayland. Never crashed. It'd be helpful to know what distro you are using. Fedora has the best Wayland experience of them all, others not so much.

You wouldn't have a nice Wayland experience on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for example.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#219

Post by im3w1l »

zahllos wrote: post #110
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…

I am actually for keeping the legacy scheme around for a good while, mostly because there's plenty of hardware even now that relies on it. But UEFI is more sane. Bios systems map the first 512 bytes which are both code and partition table into ram. Into that you need to cram enough code to locate stage 2, which I think tended to be located in the alignment space between the MBR and the next sector. Stage 2 once loade…

What I like about bios is how simple stupid it is. It reads a bunch of bytes in and boom and starts running them. Partition tables and multiple stages, yes that is the convention but you dont have to adhere to that if you dont want to. Having to change into long mode, yes that is an important wrinkle I give you that. But either way, the design is so simple that you could write a little hello world mbr-program with a hex editor. It's a handful of bytes.

Ok contrast that with UEFI. There are FAT boot partitions and PE executables and what not. That's a lot more complexity.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#220

Post by ElectricalUnion »

Scramblejams wrote: post #181

In my admittedly limited time using Linux (switched to it full-time in ~2001), the total amount of effort I've spent troubleshooting issues has probably been dominated by two categories: 1. Getting audio to behave. 2. Boot problems. (waves at LILO) I don't know enough details about how UEFI and BIOS and MBR and GRUB and all of this works -- which probably contributed to my difficulties. But the problems certainly did…

> what would it take to make a PC bootloader work just as nicely?

If we take Apple's bootloader as a base line:

Drop GPU support, except for blessed models, from initial boot support.

Remove RAM customization options. Can't change speed and timings. Can't support ECC. Might as well disallow customizing RAM alltogether and solder it to the board or in the SOC.

Remove CPU customization options. Can't change speed, enable or disable supported features. Can't chage ACPI tables.

Remove storage customization options. Can't change storage speed, protocol support. Can't even add or remove internal storage devices at all, if we go by the latest trend.

Implement a bluetooth stack onto the bootloader firmware, because that's for sure safe and could never go wrong. Force OSes to write their pairing keys in the firmware storage.

Implement a wifi stack onto the bootloader firmware, because that's for sure safe and could never go wrong. Force OSes to write their pairing keys in the firmware storage.

Implement internet-based, network boot support from a centralized, blessed location. Because that's completly safe and could never go wrong.

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