Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support

[eydee]

Considering that Fedora isn't a general use case home desktop, it's fine. If grandma buys a cheap laptop that is switched to legacy mode by default, as it ships with FreeDOS, the chances of grandma attempting to install Fedora instead and failing in the process is quite low. This would be more impactful for something like Ubuntu and friends, that are trying to catch computer illiterate folk too.

Virtualization is just a temporary issue. If demand for proper EFI supports grows, it's gonna be sorted out eventually.

[ix900]

sure, why not make it difficult if it could have just worked ;-)

No pain no gain lol.

[wizard69]

This is one of those tuff to suggest ideas that never have a good time to implement! Almost everyone will admit that we would need to move forward at Some point while at the same time never agreeing on that point. Considering what Fedora is suppose to be, a bleeding edge distro, it would make sense for them to be he first to do this.

If this was Debian or even Ubuntu it would be easy to say this is too early. Fedora however isn't really comparable to those distros which choose stability over new technology and concepts. So I'm going to say go for it.

[peterdk]

Somehow my brand new Asrock B550M Pro4 mobo does not allow booting from SATA when in UEFI mode. I can only select a NVME, but I needed to boot from the SATA SSD one. Really weird. And that is one of the most recent motherboards available. All 6 sata drives are not visible to the bios in UEFI.

[garegin]

Somehow my brand new Asrock B550M Pro4 mobo does not allow booting from SATA when in UEFI mode. I can only select a NVME, but I needed to boot from the SATA SSD one. Really weird. And that is one of the most recent motherboards available. All 6 sata drives are not visible to the bios in UEFI.

Did you do a BIOS update? A bug like that is pretty critical. I’ll contact and inform them about it.

[peterdk]

Did you do a BIOS update? A bug like that is pretty critical. I’ll contact and inform them about it.

Yeah I did the update. Didn't change anything. Ubuntu 20.04 is on the SATA SSD. I assume there is no special setting you need for being bootable by efi? Or does GRUB need to know about it and prepare some files? Anyway, will contact Asrock indeed.

[andyprough]

I don't think Fedora devs need to worry about too many people trying to install their distro on a legacy system. Older systems, if they would run at all with modern Fedora, would run painfully slowly.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Somehow my brand new Asrock B550M Pro4 mobo does not allow booting from SATA when in UEFI mode. I can only select a NVME, but I needed to boot from the SATA SSD one. Really weird. And that is one of the most recent motherboards available. All 6 sata drives are not visible to the bios in UEFI.

Set your SATA controller mode to AHCI unless you're using RAID. AHCI is fine. It does everything, like support NCQ and TRIM and all the usual stuff. I don't see any benefit to using RAID, especially if it's some janky cheap onboard controller like a J-Micron or something, unless you're actually setting up a RAID array. All common OS's have supported generic AHCI for years now.

But also, Asrock boards are pretty much trash. They were a spinoff company from Asus from when Asus wanted to get into uber-budget products, and they spun it off when the head company didn't want to deal with the high warranty returns due to low QA from cutting corners in production. I worked at a computer shop that ordered a couple different sets of motherboards for building systems and in one stack of a dozen, 2 were DOA and the rest didn't last 6 months. A few years later and it was a pretty similar story: none of them lasted a year. The company couldn't believe that their own shoddy manufacturing was the result. It was a nightmare because even the replacements didn't last another year. After the second set of returns, the company said they would only cover the second set of replacements for 90 days because they were already EOL'd, and that meant that they never provided the full term of the warranty because of a clause which stated that replacements are not covered for the full extent of the remainder of the original warranty term. It cost the store thousands of dollars in lost labour, switching them out for another brand at their expense, and the bad reputation that resulted from the situation.

[ssokolow]

I'll probably stay on my BIOS-based, pre-PSP system until something in the mobo-RAM-CPU triad breaks. Less closed code for exploitable bugs to hide in that way.

[peterdk]

Set your SATA controller mode to AHCI unless you're using RAID. AHCI is fine. It does everything, like support NCQ and TRIM and all the usual stuff. I don't see any benefit to using RAID, especially if it's some janky cheap onboard controller like a J-Micron or something, unless you're actually setting up a RAID array. All common OS's have supported generic AHCI for years now.

But also, Asrock boards are pretty much trash. [..]

Yeah, it's set to AHCI, I use ZFS for the HDD's. But I just couldn't select anything in the boot settings, also no boot ordering of HDD, just nothing. I have only Asrock boards for the past 5 years, and I really like them in general. Never had a real issue. But yeah, maybe next time I will look to a bit more premium brand.