On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 05:24:05PM -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> There are still new systems built today that only support BIOS, and vendors
> providing systems factory-configured for BIOS boot on hardware that does
> support UEFI.
Lots of hardware has a very long tail -- For example, Intel didn't
actually stop making the 80386 and 80486 until late 2007, yet Fedora
never ran on anything older than the original Pentium, which was a full
decade old when FC1 landed in 2003.
> There is no 2TB upper limit on drive sizes as a result of booting from
> BIOS.
I still have two BIOS-only systems in production that can't handle a
_boot_ drive over 2TB in size. (They also can't boot off of USB sticks)
> I don't know where you got this, but that's completely false. You can use GPT
> partition tables on systems with BIOS boot. Whoever told you otherwise is
> misinformed at best.
Of course folks can use use GPT partitioning with BIOS; they just can't
boot off of it.
> Why do you "despise" BIOS boot?
There are better, simpler booting mechanisms that don't require
emulating the behavior (and working around the limitations) of the
40-year-old original IBM PC and the even-older i8086.
No matter how you or I feel about legacy BIOS booting, Intel has ended
support for it, so Fedora *must* be ready for a UEFI-only future. We
can no longer tell folks "just revert to BIOS boot to fix problem X"
(But at the same time Fedora has to continue to support BIOS booting for
the forseable future, because there's still a considerable install base
of BIOS-boot systems)
> > BIOS-based systems make up a miniscule minority of the current market.
> > Pretending otherwise is delusional, and delusions are no basis for
> > technical decisions.
>
> That's absolutely false, as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread.
> Pretending otherwise is delusional, and delusions are no basis for
> technical decisions.
I have hard data to back up my assertions. What do you have?
Fine, I'll show my work.
There were 260-odd-million "PCs" shipped in 2019, and about another 12
million physical servers, according to IDC. (Note this explicitly
excludes Chromebooks) For simplicty's sake, let's assume all servers run
Linux, along with a generous 2% of the desktop market. This leaves
Apple and Windows with about 94% of the 2019 market.
Every one of those shipped Apple and Windows-based systems boots using
UEFI. Even if we (falsely) assume that every single linux system boots
using BIOS instead of UEFI, that means that in 2019, BIOS-booting
systems make up *at most* 6% of the market.
Mind you, that's BIOS-booting, not BIOS-only. The actual BIOS-only
numbers will be *much* smaller, for the simple reason that OEMs
generally need to have their hardware able to pass Windows
Certification, which means the presence of full UEFI, even on servers.
The ones that don't care about Windows certification are boutique OEMs
like System76 and folks that make very long-lifecycle industrial systems
meant to run generally ancient software, neither of which ship in any
appreciable volume compared to general-purpose desktops and laptops.
(System76 in particular is a private company, but the public data I've
found caps their annual revenues at about $50M, which, assuming an
average price of $1000/system, gives them only 50,000 units/year.
That's less than 0.02% market share)
So yes, BIOS-only systems represent a *miniscule* portion of the market
today, and that will only decrease further. Pretending otherwise is
delusional.
I stand by what I've written, and I've backed it up with actual numbers
and only a minor amount of conjecture.
Please, prove me wrong.
- Solomon
--
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
@pizza:shaftnet dot org (matrix)
High Springs, FL speachy (freenode)
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