Fedora BIOS Boot SIG Launched For Those Wanting To Maintain Legacy BIOS Support

[sinepgib]

What if those users hate all the other distros and Fedora is the only distro they like? Cause that's kinda how I feel.
While I don't necessarily "hate" all the other distros, to me, Fedora is the closest to being perfect. What are the other options so far? I don't want Debian Stable or other LTS grade distros because the packages are too old. I don't want Ubuntu because of their push of Snaps. And I'm also not a fan of rolling release distros. I'm sure I'm not the only want who feels like this about my distro choice.

If that's the case, in the case BIOS support actually got removed, there's always the option of making a downstream fork by the interested parties. It's open source, there's always a solution. The only problem is that solution always requires work.

[You-]

What if those users hate all the other distros and Fedora is the only distro they like? Cause that's kinda how I feel.

Congratulations, this SIG is precisely for you. It has been designed to cater for those that want to use Fedora with legacy boot options for users who want to keep it around. Membership means you get to test changes to make sure it keeps working.

[You-]

Red Hat has developers working on the various upstream codebases and if there isn't a commercial requirement that supports that work ie) Red Hat enterprise customers, they will have to hand it off to the broader community to take it up .

I think this point is often missed. The hobby distros and projects can often only function because someone is doing the heavy leg work. If those people or companies stop, their burden will become much higher or even impossible.

I was recently thinking it would be fun to start a project to make my own phone. I think I can get 95% of the way there with off the shelf components and software, without even needing to make my own distro. However such a project would be impossible to comprehend without the massive ecosystem that has invested in making it a possibility, both from the hardware and software prospects. If I try it, I get to piggy back on their work.

[jb.1234abcd]

Whatever manpower they have, they have no obligation to any particular non-paying user. You get what you paid for. You get something for free, you say "thanks". You want it to do x thing, you pay or you do it yourself.

Is that true ?

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html

And Elvis dindo drugs ...

[sinepgib]

Is that true ?

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html

And Elvis dindo drugs ...

What is exactly your point here?

[jb.1234abcd]

What is exactly your point here?

Well, your opinion is as true as mine. Except, we both got it upside down.

[BingoNightly]

Yea, Kaby Lake is so ancient.

While Kaby Lake was long after UEFI was introduced large vendors (eg Lenovo) were still shipping broken UEFI even at that point, which couldn't boot Linux without ugly workarounds like using legacy boot mode, and that probably continued even more recently than that.

?? Is this something specific to Kaby Lake? I have Lenovos from Ivy Bridge through Skylake (and a couple Silvermonts) and they all boot fine with UEFI, no workarounds or hacks needed during install.

[erniv2]

Yea, Kaby Lake is so ancient.

While Kaby Lake was long after UEFI was introduced large vendors (eg Lenovo) were still shipping broken UEFI even at that point, which couldn't boot Linux without ugly workarounds like using legacy boot mode, and that probably continued even more recently than that.

That is the manufacturers descision, if you want this shiney windows 10 ready windows 11 ready stickers you have to use secure boot, and if they decide to use the microsoft zertificate and not the uefi zertificate, then you are out of luck trying to boot another os like linux, most of the time they wont even access a live usb stick and just start windows like intended, has nothing to do with UEFI.

[calc]

?? Is this something specific to Kaby Lake? I have Lenovos from Ivy Bridge through Skylake (and a couple Silvermonts) and they all boot fine with UEFI, no workarounds or hacks needed during install.

It did not seem specific to just Kaby Lake, but Lenovo does have multiple firmware teams, and even using different brand firmwares depending on product line, so maybe only some of the teams are actually competent.

The issue appears to have been that the systems would only boot Windows, unless you manually changed the UEFI boot order via efibootmgr under Linux, and would not display the UEFI boot entries menu, at boot time or even in the firmware selection screen, no matter if there were multiple entries in it or not. To get Linux to boot at all required booting off USB live image to run efibootmgr then tell it to boot the Linux entry.

The same kind of problem also happened on Dell systems, and probably many other companies that only ever checked that their UEFI could boot the default Windows entry for the OS they shipped with.

[erniv2]

It did not seem specific to just Kaby Lake, but Lenovo does have multiple firmware teams, and even using different brand firmwares depending on product line, so maybe only some of the teams are actually competent.

The issue appears to have been that the systems would only boot Windows, unless you manually changed the UEFI boot order via efibootmgr under Linux, and would not display the UEFI boot entries menu, at boot time or even in the firmware selection screen, no matter if there were multiple entries in it or not. To get Linux to boot at all required booting off USB live image to run efibootmgr then tell it to boot the Linux entry.

The same kind of problem also happened on Dell systems, and probably many other companies that only ever checked that their UEFI could boot the default Windows entry for the OS they shipped with.

This is exactly the problem i just described above, Branded systems, Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, you name them, lock their UEFI(BIOS) in wierd ways, and then you need to know your way around that is your "hackery".

Can i deactivate Secure Boot if you can good, do i want to ?
Can i choose another zertificate (i dont know this one, too much trouble, downloading one, updating firmware, hackery delux, chance of bricking your mainboard no tnx.)

Can i even use another bootloader, if it´s an acer system probably not (i once had one, yes i was realy this dumb, chances of bricking your pc 100%. Why ? Because they use special partitions and MBR´S there is code in the UEFI(BIOS) that accesses the MBR wich is also nonstandard to access the Recovery Partitions. Oh theres 64GB Unused Disk space let´s install Linux there, DUDUD you just bricked your system, Do you want to install Grub as Bootmanager in the MBR sector ? DUDUD you just bricked your system.)

Long story short if it´s a laptop and branded and has a shiney sticker on it that says windows ready, it´s a pain in the ass to install Linux.

If you want the Linux way you probably build your own PC from parts and know what you do.