Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support

Fedora stakeholders are debating the merits of potentially ending legacy BIOS support for the Linux distribution and to only support UEFI-based installations...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Discuss-Legacy-BIOS-Drop

[rene]

Fedora always has the best plumbing of implementation details like this.

[schmidtbag]

I don't really see the problem. If push comes to shove, you can run an EFI on a legacy system - that's how Hackintoshes work on legacy systems.

[xpris]

omg but I think the decision will be very stupid. I myself have two working PCs that I still use BIOS.
For me, Fedora has been pushing stupid ideas lately.

[JustinTurdeau]

omg but I think the decision will be very stupid. I myself have two working PCs that I still use BIOS.
For me, Fedora has been pushing stupid ideas lately.

They often suggest stuff like this, just to gauge the reaction. If they just have a poll, no one replies. If they threaten to remove stuff, everyone replies. I doubt they'll actually do it.

[skeevy420]

Is this more about shifting to systemd-boot than it is about dropping BIOS support?

And that 2005 argument isn't the best since my 16 core 2010 system came with a BIOS. This seems more political than practical at this point; especially since there isn't a defined and agreed upon manner to handle legacy BIOS systems nor was there even a proposal to handle them. If we can all agree on something like rEFInd or Coreboot+Seabios, cool beans, but until then....I dunno, seems like the better question would be "How do we get systemd-boot onto legacy systems so we can drop GRUB and streamline the Fedora experience?".

[swagg_boi]

There's still machines with BIOS that are viable. My dual-socket Opteron is a little power hungry but can compile Linux 5.4.x in about 7 and a half minutes. I hope they keep BIOS/legacy booting around until I can afford a Threadripper upgrade

[birdie]

This is 100% asinine and should be abandoned for at least 5 years.

[rene]

This is 100% asinine and should be abandoned for at least 5 years.

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

[RahulSundaram]

They often suggest stuff like this, just to gauge the reaction. If they just have a poll, no one replies. If they threaten to remove stuff, everyone replies. I doubt they'll actually do it.

Keep in mind, it is a public mailing list and anyone can post ideas. This is a volunteer contributor posting his personal idea. If it is popular and people don't see a problem, it may get implemented. Quite frequently on changes like this, people point out issues and it gets shot down. I wouldn't freak out just because an idea gets posted in a list. If you have something useful to contribute, feel free to participate though