Fedora 37 Will Not Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[sinepgib]

I'm not sure the two of you are really talking about the same cases, but VMs aren't necessarily "easy to upgrade". Removing BIOS support certainly means a higher chance of upgrading AWAY from Fedora though, which seems unlikely to have been the intent.

It's worth remembering that there are a LOT more virtualized Linux installs than there are bare metal ones. While the situation with Linux is a lot better than it is with e.g. legacy XP VMs for industrial equipment etc, if Fedora removes itself from being able to run AS a VM then it's removing itself from a larger market than just "physical HW that's more than a few years old".

No, I meant upgrade the "hardware". It's a software config rather than actual metal. But some stated they had issues with UEFI in VMs and since I'm not really that much of a user I believe them. Migrating from BIOS to UEFI in real hardware is a much more involved process, at least in theory.

I actually maintain one of those still (for someone who has 2 other laptops, both of them with much newer and faster CPUs, much more RAM, etc, but that's the one they like because of keyboard/screen). It never ran Unity because I didn't want to deal with the problems the UI would create, but my guess is that Unity sucked on it because of the state of the ATI drivers at the time.

In my personal case, it sucked because it required hardware acceleration to work properly and I had a half-supported UniChrome II. I didn't have money for anything better at the time.
The UI being so far from the old desktop metaphor didn't help me to tolerate the slowness in the slightest either.

Pretty much, yeah - and even the RAM aspect is 99% just a "bad websites" problem really, but that ship's long since sailed.

Indeed. Most native desktop apps aren't that much less efficient. But we live in a bloated web world and I take that into account when estimating how well an old computer will do.

[arQon]

These Core 2 Duo may have been used in motherboards that did support UEFI, but not all of them did. In my experience it wasn't even commonplace before 2010.

I think even 2010 is being generous.

The reason Intel had support for it back in the C2D era (which is technically correct, but I suspect is the result of looking it up on Wikipedia rather than actual knowledge) is because Apple wanted it.
Support for "real" PCs rather than just Macs with a small subset of known HW was, as you say, much later than that: realistically, not until W8 (late 2012 / early 2013) at best. Prior to that, although a small number of systems did technically "support" UEFI they nearly all shipped with BIOS mode as the default, and the UEFI implementations tended to be buggy at best. Given how poor W8's reception was and how few machines were sold with it, UEFI only really became standard with W10.

> Besides, the main limiting factor for running modern distros tends to be RAM rather than CPU power.

Pretty much, yeah - and even the RAM aspect is 99% just a "bad websites" problem really, but that ship's long since sailed.

As someone else pointed out earlier, a Sandy-era i7 with a 7970 is still massively more powerful overall than an Alder Lake i3 launched this year. High-end systems from a decade ago still outclass today's low-end systems, because half of that interval was spent with AMD lost in the weeds and Intel utterly stagnant.

[arQon]

Linux, yes. Most mainstream distros, not so much. For once I'm certain my old Athlon 64 X2 crawled with its 1GB of RAM with Unity in 2010 when it was made default on Ubuntu

I actually maintain one of those still (for someone who has 2 other laptops, both of them with much newer and faster CPUs, much more RAM, etc, but that's the one they like because of keyboard/screen). It never ran Unity because I didn't want to deal with the problems the UI would create, but my guess is that Unity sucked on it because of the state of the ATI drivers at the time.

[arQon]

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

I'm not sure the two of you are really talking about the same cases, but VMs aren't necessarily "easy to upgrade". Removing BIOS support certainly means a higher chance of upgrading AWAY from Fedora though, which seems unlikely to have been the intent.

It's worth remembering that there are a LOT more virtualized Linux installs than there are bare metal ones. While the situation with Linux is a lot better than it is with e.g. legacy XP VMs for industrial equipment etc, if Fedora removes itself from being able to run AS a VM then it's removing itself from a larger market than just "physical HW that's more than a few years old".

[ezst036]

You can use an other distro.
You can sell you old cluncky shitty computer and use the money to buy a modern one (even second one).
Fedora could you use resources for something greater than support cheap minded fucks like you

Thank you for your kind words.

[sinepgib]

Like, from 2000 or so? 'Cause Intel already implemented UEFI support on Core 2 Duo CPU's. So except for a few CPU's, most of at least Intel CPU's have had UEFI for many years now as Core 2 Duo was first available in 2006 (!). Which means that chances are slim that you will have a pre-UEFI system that Fedora 37 will run fine on, as those are extremely old by now.

The CPUs don't store the firmware, nor are they bound to any given implementation. These Core 2 Duo may have been used in motherboards that did support UEFI, but not all of them did. In my experience it wasn't even commonplace before 2010.
Besides, the main limiting factor for running modern distros tends to be RAM rather than CPU power. As long as your processor can have plenty (say, 8GB is enough to be comfortable, 4GB more or less works) it'll probably be usable. Even first gen i7 supported much more than that for desktop, back in 2008.

Also, a nit, pretty much all of x86 CPUs should be able to run UEFI, as it has very little to do with the processor and needs no special support AFAICT. It's a regular program that gets loaded from a specific address by the CPU. You can even use UEFI for ARM.

[user1]

Like, from 2000 or so? 'Cause Intel already implemented UEFI support on Core 2 Duo CPU's. So except for a few CPU's, most of at least Intel CPU's have had UEFI for many years now as Core 2 Duo was first available in 2006 (!). Which means that chances are slim that you will have a pre-UEFI system that Fedora 37 will run fine on, as those are extremely old by now.

The CPU's I was talking about in my reply are from 2008-2011. While the UEFI spec already existed from 2006 and even if these CPU's technically support it, I still haven't heard about any UEFI motherboard from before 2010. Could you give me at least one model of such motherboard? Both of the old PC's I mention in my previous reply only have legacy bios.
AFAIK, UEFI motherboards started to gain popularity from 2012.

[Vistaus]

There are still pretty capable pre-UEFI hardware

Like, from 2000 or so? 'Cause Intel already implemented UEFI support on Core 2 Duo CPU's. So except for a few CPU's, most of at least Intel CPU's have had UEFI for many years now as Core 2 Duo was first available in 2006 (!). Which means that chances are slim that you will have a pre-UEFI system that Fedora 37 will run fine on, as those are extremely old by now.

[sinepgib]

It's even more rare in your case winboy. Btw. how do you feel after realizing how broken windows, ntfs and win32 api are?

Honest question, how are those broken?

This is a ridiculous statement. Fedora is the supported Linux distro at the many billion dollar per quarter tech mega corp with over 100,000 employees where I work. It's the same at Facebook and other giant tech companies. The people using Linux at work tend to be in software development / DevOps /etc. These people generally do not want an ancient base layer from an LTS, even if they are heavily using containers. A lot of these companies are also running their infrastructure on RHEL or some binary compatible offering, so Fedora on the desktop for those employees that need / want Linux is also easier from a support / tooling / automation perspective.

RHEL is not Fedora tho. It moves at a much slower pace. I don't work at many billion dollars per quarter tech mega corps but I wouldn't recommend for them to use Fedora anyway. Even if they prefer to not go with LTS it moves way too fast, probably just use Ubuntu I guess :shrug:
If they want to move fast for the sake of moving fast they could use Arch/something Arch based as well. Which is what I do, BTW (TM).
Regarding support/tooling/automation: support and tooling is so much a moot point considering RHEL tends to use ancient software compared to Fedora that I don't think it even needs to be addressed. You would have fewer problems for that with an LTS that also uses ancient software. Automation isn't really that hard regardless of using RPM or APT, and much of the compatibility issues are already solved if you use systemd native tools.
Regardless, I'll take a wild guess that many billion dollars per quarter tech mega corps don't often let workstations become more than a few years old. So even then, Fedora dropping stuff for old hardware is irrelevant for them (and probably the reason Fedora doesn't want to invest in it, because these mega corps aren't interested in funding that support because they won't use it).

[Mateus Felipe]

It's sad they stepped back on this decision. BIOS isn't even a thing today.