On Tue, 2020-06-30 at 13:34 +0000, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: > Given Hans proposal [1] introduced systemd/grub2/Gnome upstream > changes > it beg the question if now would not be the time to stop supporting > booting in legacy bios mode and move to uefi only supported boot > which > has been available on any common intel based x86 platform since > atleast > 2005. > > Now in 2017 Intel's technical marketing engineer Brian Richardson > revealed in a presentation that the company will require UEFI Class > 3 > and above as in it would remove legacy BIOS support from its client > and > datacenter platforms by 2020 and one might expect AMD to follow Intel > in > this regard. > > So Intel platforms produced this year presumably will be unable > to run > 32-bit operating systems, unable to use related software (at least > natively), and unable to use older hardware, such as RAID HBAs (and > therefore older hard drives that are connected to those HBAs), > network > cards, and even graphics cards that lack UEFI-compatible vBIOS > (launched > before 2012 – 2013) etc. > > This post is just to gather feed back why Fedora should still > continue > to support legacy BIOS boot as opposed to stop supporting it and > potentially drop grub2 and use sd-boot instead. > > Share your thoughts and comments on how such move might affect you > so > feedback can be collected for the future on why such a change might > be > bad, how it might affect the distribution and scope of such change > can > be determined for potential system wide proposal. Reason 1: I don't see a reason for supporting the planned obsolescence that hardware companies try to push on users. Reason 2: I bought my latest laptop in the end of 2019. It's an HP laptop with a Ryzen quad-core CPU. Yes, it has UEFI, but I bought it without Windows, so it came preinstalled with FreeDOS, which runs in legacy mode only. I installed Fedora on it, without switching to UEFI mode. I believe many users who buy laptops without Windows would be using Linux in legacy boot mode, just because it's the only way to boot FreeDOS, and companies such as HP only offer you the option of having Windows or FreeDOS preinstalled. Overall, it is pain and breakage for a portion of the users, while I don't see a particularly strong benefit - testing and maintaining legacy BIOS boot support should be easy, because every VM out there supports it, and it's even the default for most of them. In fact, I've never tried UEFI in a VM, and I have no idea how stable it is. But even if it's stable, I wouldn't want to have to migrate them to UEFI, because that would require repartitioning, which could cause loss of data in case something goes wrong, which leads us to reason 3: Reason 3: Migration path to UEFI boot mode is difficult even for modern systems, that were installed in legacy mode. It requires tinkering with the BIOS settings, which is non-standard and therefore different for every computer, and also repartitioning and reinstall of all operating systems on the computer. Even if this is automated, there are many dangerous scenarios that can cause loss of data. Think about multiboot scenarios, for example, where a user is multibooting Windows 10 and Fedora. We simply can't handle the upgrade in this case, without destroying the Windows 10 installation, even if we are able to upgrade a Fedora only install (and even that is dangerous). Best regards, Nikolay _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
