> 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. > > > Regards > > Jóhann B. > > > 1. > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/CleanupGnomeHiddenBootMenuIntegration The primary areas of concern I have about Fedora dropping grub2 and BIOS boot support are: 1. Users that are on systems that do not support UEFI, or that knowingly (or unknowingly) use BIOS boot on UEFI-capable systems. These people are likely to form a lasting negative impression of Fedora, as removing BIOS boot support would ostensibly mean that Fedora no longer runs on their systems (at least as configured). I have heard that the UEFI implementations on some (typically older) motherboards can be buggy, so many users may have a legitimate reason to still use BIOS boot on boards that advertise support for both. 2. How would dropping grub2 affect users that boot multiple operating systems? What manual steps, if any, would users need to take if they were previously using grub2 to support booting multiple operating systems. Would this change break existing multi-boot setups? 3. Virtual machines typically default to BIOS boot. It's my understanding that libvirt, Virtual Box, Hyper-V (gen1 VMs only?), and many cloud providers default to using BIOS boot when creating virtual machines. If Fedora no longer works *by default* with common virtualization stacks I'd imagine many users will simply choose to no longer run or recommend Fedora. 4. Support documentation for sd-boot Would this result in changes to how users access the boot menu, select a boot entry, or edit the kernel command line, etc? These actions of course aren't expected to be common but when they are needed it tends to be when a user is already experiencing problems and is under stress. Therefore if there are changes, hopefully these will be clearly documented to avoid confusion. 5. What does Fedora gain by dropping BIOS boot support? Perhaps it is obvious to others, but I think it is worth fully spelling out what the expected benefits are. This would help everyone more clearly see the trade-offs of this change. _______________________________________________ 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
