Originally posted by AmericanLocomotive
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Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support
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Originally posted by AmericanLocomotive View PostYou're neglecting the fact that SeaBIOS is the coreboot default payload. It's also the most mature, least buggy and most easy to compile payload available for coreboot right now. Many people experience issues getting TianoCore to work correctly or even compile.
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Originally posted by AmericanLocomotive View PostYou're neglecting the fact that SeaBIOS is the coreboot default payload. It's also the most mature, least buggy and most easy to compile payload available for coreboot right now. Many people experience issues getting TianoCore to work correctly or even compile.
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Originally posted by michaelb1 View PostThat too shows the true uselessness of UEFI: if UEFI was really that beautiful and vitally important for modern computing, the coreboot community members would've fixed these Tianocore issues long ago. I'm one of those people - have been contributing to coreboot since 2016 - and I haven't ever bothered even trying to run this UEFI crap on any of my coreboot machines.
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Originally posted by michaelb1 View PostThat too shows the true uselessness of UEFI: if UEFI was really that beautiful and vitally important for modern computing, the coreboot community members would've fixed these Tianocore issues long ago. I'm one of those people - have been contributing to coreboot since 2016 - and I haven't ever bothered even trying to run this UEFI crap on any of my coreboot machines.
- The corporate world moved on to UEFI a long time ago, except for maybe some really cash strapped holdouts, but they're probably not running Linux anyways
- CoreBoot SeaBIOS Fedora users represent an extremely tiny portion of Fedora Linux users who represent a tiny portion of FOSS Linux desktop users who represent an extremely tiny portion of all desktop users. This decision would affect what, 200 - maybe 300 people in the entire world? If anything, it would just push a few developers over to TianoCore or other UEFI payloads to make them more viable.
The only real reason they should delay this change is because of the number of systems from the 2009-2011 era that were BIOS-only, but still very viable today. However even then, many of those systems are UEFI compatible, with basically all systems 2012 and newer having UEFI support. With the current advancement of multi-core CPUs, I think those older systems realistically only have 2-3 "good" years left before they get too slow for modern software and browsers. So in 2022 or so, I think it'd be "safe" to drop legacy BIOS support.
Originally posted by Giovanni Fabbro View Post
Mr. Chromebox seems to do just fine with it. Ditto for that Raspberry Pi project.
Do you even know what you're talking about? TianoCore doesn't need Coreboot - it can do hardware init on it's own.
"TianoCore is an open source implementation of UEFI, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. UEFI (formerly EFI) is intended to replace the traditional PC BIOS. TianoCore as in implementation cannot do that, as it lacks the code to do hardware initalization. Since hardware initialization is exactly what coreboot does, the combination of coreboot + TianoCore is the most straightforward option to provide a complete, opensource UEFI environment"
Last edited by AmericanLocomotive; 02 July 2020, 01:15 PM.
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Originally posted by Giovanni Fabbro View PostTianoCore doesn't need Coreboot - it can do hardware init on it's own
Originally posted by Giovanni Fabbro View PostPeople choose SeaBIOS because they need BIOS emulation.
Originally posted by Giovanni Fabbro View PostIt's funny because people are using SeaBIOS with Coreboot because...what? They're not booting Linux on it? Coreboot can boot Linux natively
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Originally posted by AmericanLocomotive View PostCoreBoot SeaBIOS Fedora users represent an extremely tiny portion of Fedora Linux users
Originally posted by AmericanLocomotive View PostSo in 2022 or so, I think it'd be "safe" to drop legacy BIOS support.
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If you use always the same name for kernel+initrd inside ESP then you don't need any additional bootloader at all. You configure this directly with efibootmgr and UEFI already has got a boot menu. The only drawback of this method is that some boards, especially ASUS ones after a specific firmware release, delete entries as long the efi binary is the same. You can use a trick and use different upper-/lowercase writing but this is hard to do that in an automatic way. Btw. the bug was introduced 2012 and I reported it to ASUS of course but as expected they did not intend to fix it.
With legacy mode you need an extra boot loader, gummiboot or sd-boot is coming close to the native speed but GRUB is certainly a bit slower. However these tiny differences have no huge impact in general use, but are fun to try.
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Originally posted by michaelb1 View PostThat too shows the true uselessness of UEFI: if UEFI was really that beautiful and vitally important for modern computing, the coreboot community members would've fixed these Tianocore issues long ago. I'm one of those people - have been contributing to coreboot since 2016 - and I haven't ever bothered even trying to run this UEFI crap on any of my coreboot machines.
Drop native BIOS support, and provide a grub2 built in UEFI on BIOS compatability layer of some sort, that is the obvious solution forward. Don't drop support before the layer is ready to use though.Last edited by techzilla; 16 July 2020, 02:23 PM.
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Originally posted by michaelb1 View PostIndeed, it's true - but if this dumb trend set up by RedHat/Fedora catches on (just like SystemD), it could be a matter of time before there would be just a few distros we, the coreboot+SeaBIOS users, could run to: just like there are only a few decent not-SystemD distros like Artix. So, we should fight this "drop legacy BIOS" idea in its' infancy, before it spreads like a fire.
There are no technical reasons for dropping a legacy BIOS support, much fewer reasons than tying almost every Linux distro to SystemD with nails. They raised this idea only because want to replace GRUB with some new systemd stuff and its' too dumb to boot the legacy systems. So I hope that legacy BIOS support will never get dropped in this century, regardless of the actions of "standard pushers" corporate strongmen
The hard reality is this though, my whole career was doing Linux, and there are plenty of things I like about the *Nix world... there are plenty of things I don't like about it, and plenty of things that MS has that we don't. Now with the explosion of ARM devices, on different SBC platforms, the reality is that Linux cannot sustain an ecosystem that empowers everyone. By nature of its fundamental design, it requires a very severe degree of centralized control to maintain, which inherently chokes off innovation and evolution. Source code isn't enough, is not the end of the story, and in many cases is less important than the freedoms we don't have now. Most people don't want to tied together in a bureaucratic source control morass, but the OS design ensures that nothing independent is maintainable, unless you are a tech monopoly. In addition said centralized bureaucracy has become intolerably woke, and outright hostile to meritocracy.
I'm ready to make a switch the second an OS pops up that allows developers to write and maintain their own code, but fit into the larger whole... a truly componentized OS so to speak. I needs a clean build system, and components shouldn't be in one gigantic single root codebase. (in case Google is reading this)Last edited by techzilla; 16 July 2020, 02:40 PM.
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