Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support

[Giovanni Fabbro]

You don't run KVM on a home computer, except for special cases. It isn't a competitor to virtualbox, which is a fully type-2 hypervisor, and is usually used to run another OS on top of some OS. Like you want to test drive you newest distro, you run it in virtualbox. KVM is more of an enterprise-level solution, and an average being can't even operate it without extensive research and learning.

Virtualbox is just Oracle's version of Virtual PC, which even Microsoft was smart enough to kill off. It's a piece of garbage. KVM with virt-manager is superior in every way, and also pretty easy to use - if you need to run virtualization, you should learn a few things. Otherwise you have GNOME Boxes - which I might add, ALSO uses KVM.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

I guess my only question is where is the line drawn? EFI v1? v1.2?

There were a million Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge's that had those 1st and 2nd generation EFI implementations.

I have run scripts that require UEFI and these systems report as "pass" but when you install the OS, it won't boot.

Futzing with the EFI partition and the related files is not an answer. All I ask is if Fedora draws the line, make sure they have a script to check the EFI revision and tell people if it doesn't cut it or not.

UEFI is EFI 2.0. EFI 1.0/1.1 is what you might find on weird server motherboards before UEFI was a thing, as well as older Mac systems. UEFI is what Windows Vista SP1 and newer support. Windows never supported EFI before UEFI, except on Itanium IA-64, but that's been entirely discontinued anyway. Most of the EFI 1.x variants on server boards are just for system management purposes and include a shell, but supposedly you can shoehorn in a Linux install on them in rare cases. If you can boot Windows on it, it's UEFI. Desktop boards from companies like Intel didn't have EFI prior to UEFI. UEFI was included on boards all the way back to Core 2 days, but it was sometimes unstable and very slow to boot, or didn't always support booting from anything except a hard drive, which made it pretty useless since you had to pre-install an OS image through hard drive replication on another machine; you couldn't boot from USB or CD/DVD on some boards. Most of the old stuff is "Hybrid UEFI" wherein there was just EFI/GPT supported boot path in the BIOS. Nowadays it's all "Native UEFI" with optional BIOS boot via a BIOS emulation chip called a Compatibility Support Module (CSM). The UEFI does the hardware init, while the CSM takes over boot when it's enabled, although it usually means slower bootup, so it's best to keep it off for newer OS installs.

If you're having problem booting after installation, it's probably because your firmware is old and doesn't properly read the bootloader registration - check your installer logs to see if it threw any errors. In UEFI, bootloaders have to be installed on a FAT[32] partition, and it has to be registered in the firmware. Windows will often show up as "Windows Boot Manager", whereas Linux ones will often just simply show as the distro name: "ubuntu", "fedora", etc. Older boards, and especially those from OEM systems (Acer laptops had this issue) didn't do this properly. Newer stuff with UEFI 2.3.x generally "just works". I found that Windows tends to do this better on older boards while Linux bootloaders aren't always registered correctly, probably because it's related to Secure Boot certificate linking. If you have an old board with UEFI with or without Secure Boot and Windows installs fine but Linux doesn't, check to see if Secure Boot is enabled and disable it to see if that works. Otherwise, you might have to see if there's a bootloader selection tool in the firmware interface "BIOS Setup" (sometimes they still call it that when it's UEFI) and select the bootx64.efi or shimx64.efi file in your boot/esp partition. Some OEM firmware interfaces even require that you create a BIOS password before being able to modify bootloader settings or disabling Secure Boot, so YMMV.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

You don't have to drop legacy to improve. Thats a stupid argument and makes no sense. Legacy support in no way interferes with your ability to have UEFI boot or any other special hardware support. If you want support for the latest CPU extension that is found only recent super expensive CPUs, you should be provided with a way to compile your own binaries. For many of us it isn't worth the trouble and settle for precompiled binaries which work for everyone.

BIOS is 16-bit. The computer hardware industry has moved passed it - even passed 32-bit which I guess you didn't notice yet.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

This kind of thinking is absurd. If you no longer get updates, your system for practical purposes becomes unusable. This is because you no longer get security updates which are extremely necessary, especially for web browsers. Also web browser technology is always changing so there is the need to have a recent browser to access the web. Also makes the system useless for servers, which can be just as devastating.

I dunno why what I said came off as absurd. My point was that you can still use your computer as it is. Application package updates will still come for Linux distros, but you won't find a new installer download that works on the old hardware. It's not even as bad as the x86-32 package support being dropped. However, once you can't get any new package updates, you either keep your install discs for a possible future reinstallation and take the system offline, or replace it to have a system that's supported by current security technology so that you can use it online.

*shrug* Nobody uses Windows XP online anymore either.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

This is totally absurd and asinine. BIOS support and support for generic 686 systems must be kept for 10 years, at least. There are a LOT of perfectly functionaly BIOS based systems. 10 year old computer is still perfectly useable. The useable lifespan of a desktop computer these days can be 15-20 years, even longer. Also older computers can be donated to charity for use for education and in the third world. Dropping support for older computers contributes to the e-waste problem and is environmentally irresponsible. Why trash a computer that is still working fine, just because the STUPID Fedora developers want to drop a few lines of code to support it? Give me a break. No way jose.

If you're talking about averages, the average lifespan of any PC is 3 years. It's why typical warranties don't go beyond that**. Blame Chinese mass manufacturing and poor QA for that.


How the manufacturing industry figures out warranties:

OEM warranties for home PC's and generic business PC's are 1 year because OEM parts are only covered with a 1 year warranty between the part maker and the PC OEM.
Better business PC's have a 3 year standard warranty because the parts have a higher QA turnout and better features. Businesses often lease for 3+ years too, and PC OEM's don't like having to deal with warranty coverage during the lease period.
Retail packaged components have a 3 year warranty because the part manufacturers choose the higher QA parts for retail packaging and the shitty parts go to PC OEM's in volume lots.
Warranty extensions are just QA insurance for the manufacturers.

tl;dr version: warranty is based on the average estimated lifespan of the components, nothing more, nothing less. This is a known fact in manufacturing - it isn't some rocket science thing that was thought up at random.

Another fun fact: manufacturers don't fix DOA computers. You might have heard of "factory refurbished" PC's before, but no major OEM does that - they're auctioned off in lots to third party companies and depending on how it comes out of the supply chain, the OEM may even still track it as a refurb (HP affixes an R after the AA on the part number), but they themselves don't fix it, nor do they even cover warranty service on it. Beware of refurbs though: you can't get warranty from the manufacturer, and usually the refurbisher only covers it for 30-90 days because "if it already had one problem with it...". You know how the rest of that sentence goes. In very rare cases where the manufacturer does sell refurbs (Dell sometimes does), it's because they had a large-scale defect rate that was found and it was too expensive to auction the entire lot at a loss, so they'll fix them and sell them for very little savings. Sometimes you get lucky and get a refurb from a company like Dell for maybe $50 off, but take a look at warranty options for it and see if you can get the normal warranty extension. If they black out extended warranty options, it's a good sign to steer clear of it.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

You don't have to drop legacy to improve. Thats a stupid argument and makes no sense. Legacy support in no way interferes with your ability to have UEFI boot or any other special hardware support. If you want support for the latest CPU extension that is found only recent super expensive CPUs, you should be provided with a way to compile your own binaries. For many of us it isn't worth the trouble and settle for precompiled binaries which work for everyone.

Um...they have this operating system thing called Linux... have you heard of it?

[pal666]

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.

i have few older non-uefi systems running fedora. they run it faster than windows

[Giovanni Fabbro]

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

See my addendum in my original post.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

i have few older non-uefi systems running fedora. they run it faster than windows

Some things in Linux are faster than in Windows. Some things in Windows are faster too. I have systems that run low-end AMD APU's with GPU's that are supported by the open source AMD drivers, and Linux boots fast and is ready-to-go quicker than Windows. But stuff like video playback in a browser just works on Windows without needing to mess around with codecs or picking a particular browser because browserA doesn't do video acceleration properly, when browserB does, but it's a security nightmare. Also, NTFS support in Linux doesn't work with certain drives that I have (ISO mounting external drive enclosures that require NTFS and a hardware RAID enclosure that shares data with a Windows machine). Linux messes up file or folder permissions that the hardware doesn't recognize for some reason. They work fine when copying files directly from a Windows system though.

[pal666]

Can anyone recommend a good distro that supports XFCE well and has a sane package management system(no source based distros)?

fedora