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

[CommunityMember]

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

The issue comes down to upstream support given all the variants of bios systems out there. In a previous iteration of this issue, it was first proposed to look at TianoCore's DUET (which was intended as a EFI implementation on top of bios for early testing), but DUET is no longer support (and no one was about to pick it up). Clover can require complex configuration (system by system) which can be problematic, and upstream was primarily interested in their specific hackintosh use case, not solving the general bios booting problem on all systems. U-Boot has had a minimal UEFI implementation for some time, but whether it works on the majority of x86 bios systems, and whether that upstream is interested in supporting it on such systems, still needs further investigation.

[darkdragon-001]

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!

Luckily there are other distros which probably will continue supporting BIOS for quite some time going forward (e.g. Debian). So I think it's perfectly fine for the leading-edge distro Fedora to go ahead and remove BIOS support there.

[stormcrow]

Luckily there are other distros which probably will continue supporting BIOS for quite some time going forward (e.g. Debian). So I think it's perfectly fine for the leading-edge distro Fedora to go ahead and remove BIOS support there.

True. But Fedora isn't just a bleeding edge distro. It's also the gatekeeping test bed for what will end up in RHEL. RHEL has to support what enterprise customers use. Enterprises are some of the most foot dragging, delay ridden, penny pinching pound foolish, stubborn customers. This is why I have no sympathy for the likes of AWS, but I do for the individual - who needs or wants to use Fedora because they need to help support it and/or RHEL& RHEL-based distros. If u-boot will work around this problem, then it's a good alternative to check into.

[hf_139]

You don't need a bootloader at all on UEFI systems - you can tell the EFI to directly load the kernel - and for me it always felt outdated and unnecessary to see GRUB on my system.
For some time, i did boot without bootloader, but i got issues with all the update scripts and feared that dist upgrades mess things up, so i ended up dropping it again.

[darkdragon-001]

You don't need a bootloader at all on UEFI systems - you can tell the EFI to directly load the kernel - and for me it always felt outdated and unnecessary to see GRUB on my system.
For some time, i did boot without bootloader, but i got issues with all the update scripts and feared that dist upgrades mess things up, so i ended up dropping it again.

Using systemd-boot on UEFI and uninstalling Grub on Fedora worked very well for me for quite some releases already. Never had any issues.