Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS • Hacker News Board

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#231

Post by Foxboron » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

bscphil wrote: post #200

bitwize wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing inherently Microsoft related about secure boot, Microsoft is the root of trust for ~100% of OEM secure boot implementations. Theoretically, you can implement Secure Boot with an alternative root of trust... but you'd have to get the OEMs on board... to the tune of many millions of dollars. Per OEM. The only alternative is to get users to install their own keys, which is fiddly and technical. Therefo…

> The only alternative is to get users to install their own keys, which is fiddly and technical. It's a bit worse than that actually; it's actively scary and dangerous, as with much EFI stuff. Quoting the Arch Wiki: > Warning: Replacing the platform keys with your own can end up bricking hardware on some machines, including laptops, making it impossible to get into the UEFI/BIOS settings to rectify the situation. Thi…

I wrote sbctl to try and make sure self-enrolling keys is completely painless

https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#232

Post by mattdm » Mon, Apr 25, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

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…

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

I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of effort the bootloader and hardware enablement teams who work on Fedora put in to making _systems boot Linux at all_.

Re: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

#233

Post by anothernewdude » Tue, May 03, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

dralley wrote: post #210

anothernewdude wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not true... CentOS Stream is more of a "community" than CentOS was. If you had a bug in CentOS all you can do is file an issue in the Red Hat bug tracker and wait because there was no way to contribute. With Stream it's open to not just bugfixes but community-contributed enhancements.

The three businesses I knew that used CentOS, aren't anymore. They're looking for alternatives. They didn't pick CentOS because it was cutting edge. They wanted a stable environment that wouldn't change.