Fedora 37 Will Not Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 37 Will Not Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

Following weeks of vibrant public discussions over the change proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support in Fedora 37, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has rejected the change and will keep around the BIOS booting support for now...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-37-Keeps-Legacy-BIOS

[Danny3]

Good, we don't need Planned obsolescence in Linux too!
Let's just keep the hardware from landfills as much as possible!

[birdie]

Common sense suddenly prevailed. This is almost a rarity in the world of open source.

Hopefully this "brilliant" proposal will be buried for at least a decade.

If it was for me, I'd never deprecate BIOS support. It's just too valuable and nifty to have (e.g. for VMs).

[sinepgib]

It's just too valuable and nifty to have (e.g. for VMs).

Arguably for VMs is where it matters the least. Nothing is easier to upgrade than that.

Anyway, while I don't see the big fuzz about removing BIOS support from Fedora (of course we do need some distros to keep BIOS hardware working, as a lot of it is functional), it's probably for the best that they kept it.

[GraysonPeddie]

Last I've tried with UEFI/OVMF, I am not able to create snapshots in VMs, so I resorted to BIOS instead. UEFI/OVMF is great, but it's not worth losing snapshot functionality if I need to restore back to the way it was if something in my VM went wrong. I use virt-manager if that helps.

And also, in the world of planned obsolescence, deprecation of hardware features is the same as planned obsolescence.

[sinepgib]

And also, in the world of planned obsolescence, deprecation of hardware features is the same as planned obsolescence.

It isn't as long as there are viable alternatives. Yes, Fedora would stop working, but it's not the only distribution out there and there are several focused specifically in keepin hardware alive as long as it is functional. I'd worry if GRUB or the kernel dropped it.
Antix, eLive, Archlinux32, Q4OS, Puppy, Debian, just to name a few. Fedora doesn't matter. It's not precisely lightweight anyway, so keeping BIOS support for it only really saves machines that were rather beefy at the time, you'll need another to really fight planned obsolescence.

EDIT: besides, in practice it is more a test bed for features to include in RHEL than anything else, so I'd flag it as experimental and not use it for anything serious. My advice, stick to LTS distros for older hardware and real work. And in terms of planned obsolescence, I think what should really be respected is the right to repair, rather than anyone doing it for you for free, and all open source software respects that by default.

[birdie]

Arguably for VMs is where it matters the least. Nothing is easier to upgrade than that.

Anyway, while I don't see the big fuzz about removing BIOS support from Fedora (of course we do need some distros to keep BIOS hardware working, as a lot of it is functional), it's probably for the best that they kept it.

I've had nothing but huge troubles when trying to enable EFI in VirtualBox. BIOS mode instead just works.

[Alexmitter]

A big missed chance. BIOS support is a terrible thing to maintain and keep running, this manpower could be allocated to better things.
Do you really want to run a modern distro on hardware that is as fast on 100W as a modern 15W slim notebook? There is a point on which keeping that stuff out of the Recycling is more wasteful then to use a modern product.

[treba]

I still have an old Thinkpad around that only supports bios and use it with the newest Fedora for testing - to ensure bleeding edge changes don't break on old devices. So I'm happy with the decision and hope they'll keep it around for at least 2-3 more years.

[cjcox]

Now waiting for Fefora to require TPM 2.0 (just one battle at a time....)