On Saturday, July 4, 2020 8:10:49 PM MST Solomon Peachy wrote: > 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. Many people on this very thread are still using BIOS boot systems, and one person provided a source for a NEW system they're using which is BIOS boot, while another provided factory-default BIOS configurations on hardware supporting UEFI. That's hardly similar the case you're referencing. > > 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) It can actually do both, I can dig up the solution that was provided to me, using GRUB2, from the thread where they tried to kill off optical media. > > 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. You can boot off of it, so long as you're using GRUB2. GRUB2 loads from MBR, parses the GPT, and boom, 2TB or larger partitions on BIOS. > > > 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" Intel has NOT ended support for it. Anyone claiming as much is delusional at best. We can continue to tell people "just revert to BIOS boot to fix problem X" or "Disable Secure Boot to fix problem Y". Fedora is already fine on systems that only support UEFI, using GRUB2 UEFI. > (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) Yes, and there will be for decades to come. BIOS isn't going away any time soon, just like broken EFI implementations aren't going away. > > > 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? Please read this thread before replying. I've had to repeat myself on this several times now, as have others. > 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. That's not the case, as cited earlier in this thread. > 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. Based on what? Are you assuming Linux is only on servers? As cited elsewhere in this thread, most servers, in fact, do have better BIOS support than UEFI support, with some weird quirks. If you're interested, I could give you some interesting stories about Dell's current generation PowerEdge servers, which have some BIOS/UEFI weirdness going on. They're BIOS boot by default, and will *then* load the EFI framework if you've enabled EFI, or try to load one of the vendor apps. > 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. As well as any small to medium OEM. Most OEMs don't actually care about Windows Certification. > (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. You do realize that people use the systems they've already got? We don't trash our current, working systems every Fedora release and buy a new one. > I stand by what I've written, and I've backed it up with actual numbers > and only a minor amount of conjecture. Let's be honest, neither my numbers nor yours even matter in this, beyond subjective arguments. If we want to make objective claims based on numbers, we'd need to figure out how many Fedora users have systems 1) supporting UEFI 2) using UEFI. -- John M. Harris, Jr. _______________________________________________ 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
