Fedora 27 Looks To Add 32-bit UEFI Support

[starshipeleven]

I do have a toshiba tablet which I bought last year and it has that weird combo (64bit hardware but 32bit UEFI). Last time that I tried Ubuntu it couldn't boot at all, but I didn't give it a lot of effort (if I understood correctly from the article, then Ubuntu already has this feature). I might give it another try with Fedora 27.

Yeah, Ubuntu works but depending on how you make the usb installer or how well the distro packaged the iso, you might need to change manually a file (basically adding the 32bit efi bootloader), see here https://askubuntu.com/questions/7754...ased-tablet-pc

theoretically (assuming the distro did everything right and the iso file has that file already), the best way would be to simply write the iso raw on the usb drive, with dd from linux, or from windows with rufus in "dd mode", or by using Win32 Disk Imager (again on windows).

[Hugh]

"BIOS" is the name of a type of board firmware, a specification dating back to the stone age of PC comupters with IBM compatibles.
So, UEFI boards have a UEFI, not a BIOS.

Everything you said was correct. But "BIOS" in the IBM PC ROM was a copy of BIOS in CP/M for Intel 8080 computers.

Previous operating systems had things called BIOS but CP/M is the first that I know of that used it as a compatibility layer allowing software to drive disparate hardware.

Since the BIOS was provided by IBM, and they intended to support CP/M, it isn't a rip-off. MS-DOS / PC-DOS did copy bunches of CP/M features.

The PC BIOS was way more intricate than CP/M required. It was considered a useful API for general programming. But of course it was no use for 32- or 64-bit code or anything that did preemptive multi-tasking.

[chithanh]

UEFI board firmware is VERY fucking different from BIOS board firmware, and it can do so much more and so much better than BIOS.

More, sure. Better, depends on your perspective.
UEFI is a horribly complex specification, the current version is 2,000+ pages long iirc. The reference UEFI implementation is half the size of the Linux kernel...

I previously ranted about this here:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/523824

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/531665

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/523852