Fedora Developers Discuss An Idea For Using U-Boot On x86 BIOS Systems

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Developers Discuss An Idea For Using U-Boot On x86 BIOS Systems

Last year Fedora and Red Hat developers began discussing the idea of dropping legacy BIOS support and to then only focus on UEFI platforms. There was a plan to deprecate BIOS support in Fedora 37 but ultimately it didn't go through due to some cloud providers still booting VMs in BIOS mode and some systems having broken UEFI implementations. An idea has now been raised over the possibility of using U-Boot on x86 BIOS systems to provide a UEFI-like experience from the Fedora perspective...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-U-Boot-x86-BIOS

[skeevy420]

Very funny. Many years ago, like before COVID, I suggested this, using Clover but the reasons were the same, and mostly frigging Fedora people came in with counterarguments about how that'd lose a lot of x86 support since UEFI emulating booloaders don't support the full range of hardware that native BIOS bootloaders do.

I might have lost that argument that day, but it looks like I'll win the war

[schmidtbag]

Wouldn't it be easier for users to just use something like Clover EFI?

[Eirikr1848]

Very funny. Many years ago, like before COVID, I suggested this, using Clover but the reasons were the same, and mostly frigging Fedora people came in with counterarguments about how that'd lose a lot of x86 support since UEFI emulating booloaders don't support the full range of hardware that native BIOS bootloaders do.

I might have lost that argument that day, but it looks like I'll win the war

Always cool to see some of seeds of thought you’ve sown reap a good harvest!

[sobkas]

"We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection …except for the problem of too many levels of indirection,"

[Britoid]

I am not sure there's any BIOS-only that will actually run Fedora anyway.

[jorgepl]

Wouldn't it be easier for users to just use something like Clover EFI?

But is Clover even packaged for Linux? It'd seem it's mostly for hackintosh stuff.

[emansom]

But is Clover even packaged for Linux? It'd seem it's mostly for hackintosh stuff.

Luckily rpm packages are not descended from gods and can be created for anything as long as it compiles.

[schmidtbag]

But is Clover even packaged for Linux? It'd seem it's mostly for hackintosh stuff.

It's popular for Hackintoshes because Mac requires an EFI and to my understanding, not just any EFI will do. For pretty much any other OS, they will support both BIOS and EFI, and if not, it's not that hard or expensive to just upgrade your hardware. So, using Clover for anything that isn't a Hackintosh is rather niche. Anyway, Clover is not specific Hackintoshes.
It also doesn't need to be packaged with Linux either; it can work by itself to boot whatever you want.

[stormcrow]

It's popular for Hackintoshes because Mac requires an EFI and to my understanding, not just any EFI will do. For pretty much any other OS, they will support both BIOS and EFI, and if not, it's not that hard or expensive to just upgrade your hardware. So, using Clover for anything that isn't a Hackintosh is rather niche. Anyway, Clover is not specific Hackintoshes.
It also doesn't need to be packaged with Linux either; it can work by itself to boot whatever you want.

There's a difference between "EFI" and "UEFI". EFI is an older spec before Intel (with industry input via consortium) promulgated UEFI which became the de facto standard on PCs. Apple's EFI is based on a different version of the spec and it's specific to Macs. To boot Intel Macs you have to conform to whatever Apple's EFI requires. I have no idea if they're still using EFI for their new ARM based systems or not.

After reading though the discussion material, I'm less inclined to be sympathetic to AWS who's raking in billions in profit each year. They have the money to fix their crap. I'm far more sympathetic to those stuck with broken UEFI implementations that only half way work even with Windows. You never know if you're going to get a motherboard with that kind of problem till you receive it and individuals are far less likely to be financially able to replace otherwise working systems just because their UEFI implementation is broke. It's probably a more widespread problem than it might appear as the same people writing and adapting buggy BIOS firmware back in the day are the ones that wrote the base code for buggy UEFI firmware implementations today. They usually only go so far as to getting Windows to boot then ship it (Oh, we only support* Windows, sorry for any inconvenience!)

* Barely! We never got TPM, Secure Boot, sleep/ACPI, USB compatibility, or virtualization to work properly. Sorry for the inconvenience!