Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support

[JustinTurdeau]

I mean you can read the public mailing list threads to see the opinions. There is "no rest of Fedora community here". There is no group think. Again it is a public mailing list, literally anyone can post in it including people who are not contributors at all. I don't see how that is representative of anything really.

A lot of the confusion comes down to Michael's dishonest/clickbait titles. People just read that and then instantly click "comments" and start typing out yet another uninformed rant.

[mroche]

A lot of the confusion comes down to Michael's dishonest/clickbait titles. People just read that and then instantly click "comments" and start typing out yet another uninformed rant.

Although I agree in a good amount of cases, this one I think the title is fine. I do take issue with this phrasing:

...but perhaps in the next year or following year we'll see them go forward with their plans for dropping legacy BIOS support...

There are no plans. This is someone bringing up an idea to discuss. An important point of which is the following:

Such proposal would never be about stop supporting older hardware that's just a misconception people are getting.

And it's quite evident by the response here that hw that is atleast 2010 and older is still quite happily being used and that hw does not support UEFI and no one is talking about taking that away anytime soon.

The first step ( The actual change proposal ) would simply be about replace grub2 with sd-boot for UEFI strictly on the x86 architecture which has UEFI available and enabled ( is not using legacy bios ) and see what issue are encountered, solve those then consider moving to different architectures and further integration if relevant etc. ( baby steps ) Next I would suggest looking at UEFI supported ARM systems ( but I personally would have to obtain such hardware before doing so ).

JBG

Although the discussion started with the question about BIOS support, it really evolved into how to best transition to SD-Boot from Grub2 and thoughts on that. I.e. if at install time UEFI is detected and on x86, use systemd-boot, otherwise grub. It wouldn't seem to affect active installations or anything of the ilk.

Cheers,
Mike

[RahulSundaram]

A lot of the confusion comes down to Michael's dishonest/clickbait titles. People just read that and then instantly click "comments" and start typing out yet another uninformed rant.

It is certainly attention grabbing and that's part of the business model of Phoronix. That isn't new and frequent participants in this website should be aware of that by now. In this case, the title is fine. This isn't a formal change plan however at this point. Just a thought in a mailing list. Nothing more to it.

The process for a formal change is outlined in

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/changes_policy/

Here is the list of accepted changes for this release

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:ChangeAcceptedF33

Each of them was proposed in the devel list, discussed and then accepted by a public vote by FESCo (the engineering committee in Fedora).

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Although I agree in a good amount of cases, this one I think the title is fine. I do take issue with this phrasing:



There are no plans. This is someone bringing up an idea to discuss. An important point of which is the following:



Although the discussion started with the question about BIOS support, it really evolved into how to best transition to SD-Boot from Grub2 and thoughts on that. I.e. if at install time UEFI is detected and on x86, use systemd-boot, otherwise grub. It wouldn't seem to affect active installations or anything of the ilk.

Cheers,
Mike

Changing to systemd-boot from grub wouldn't affect active installations any more than ending support for BIOS, or 32-bit code: your old install will still work. Whether or not it gets updated in the future, that's another story.

GRUB is a ham-fisted bootloader for UEFI booting. Systemd-boot is just plain better at it. It stands to reason that Red Hat would put more investment into one of their own projects rather than dig into something from the FSF, which has its own release cycle and agenda.

Ultimately, I'd like to see them quit using static swap partitions too, and switch to swapfiles by default, since they can be dynamically allocated for systems that still need them, thus not wasting extra space on systems that don't - the software should do this decision work for the user based on their workload.

(Is there no strike-thru on this board?)

It looks like they're adopting a zram thing instead. One question about that: when you have a low-RAM system with only, say, 4GB of RAM, they're allocating 2GB of that to compressed swap assuming you get a 2:1 compression, so only another 4GB of usable swap space, but you're only left with 2GB usable out of real physical RAM? So what happens if you still go over the total of 6GB (assuming your data CAN be compressed at 2:1 - which they can't guarantee)? You're just going to get an OOM condition? Seems like a silly idea to me for systems that really need to use swap. Can someone explain the reasoning behind this?

[RahulSundaram]

Ultimately, I'd like to see them quit using static swap partitions too, and switch to swapfiles by default, since they can be dynamically allocated for systems that still need them, thus not wasting extra space on systems that don't - the software should do this decision work for the user based on their workload.

Unconnected to the current post but there is already https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwapOnZRAM, an accepted change for the next release

[torsionbar28]

Honestly, at this point, they should abandon support for any CPU's using larger than 7 nm process node.

[Tomin]

Oh wait. Original Phenom? Ya, that's pretty old. Phenom II Gigabyte boards had really shitty BIOS's too - no native UEFI booting, instead used some janky thing by Gigabyte to get 2TB drive support with only BIOS booting.

I might be thinking of FX processors. FX motherboards should all have been UEFI.

It was Phenom II X4 955BE and not the older Phenom with four digit model names. Also the motherboard (Asus M5A78L/USB3) has AM3+ socket and supports FX processors although the chipset might not be the best for those.

[aht0]

My old X58 system has BIOS. Go for it, for chaos..

[hakavlad]

legacy BIOS

Stop using the L-word, please: BIOS is not "legacy", it's just alternative way (one of many).

[tildearrow]

Stop using the L-word, please: BIOS is not "legacy", it's just alternative way (one of many).

Legacy means old, dated, deprecated and superseded by something better.

The last few machines with BIOS were released in 2012. My old broken laptop used BIOS, despite being made in 2012.

However, it's been 8 years already. This does not mean everyone has dropped BIOS though (but some call it legacy because it is in fact old and crusty (since 1980, only a 512-byte bootstrap)).

Fedora just likes to drop old things quick, the Apple way.