Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[⤐⤐⤐⤐]

It remembers ElemetaryOS being "opinated" and getting kicked in nuts by users, dropping BIOS means drop swarms of users, if you drop me once, I will never give you a oportunity to do it twice, I remember someone from Intel pushing to drop X11 legacy driver support that affected my previous old but fine functional hardware and Intel will not be buy anymore. Obs. the same people then pushed to drop X11 altogether in favor of Wayland, so the legacy driver support could be there till this day since the problem was all the "X11", dropage by dropage I choose to drop the one who drops the users. Fedora "Nvidia" profile users, they don't care for anyone.

[Waethorn]

Not sure how I feel about this. There are still pretty capable pre-UEFI x86-64 systems like Intel Nehalem for example. If Fedora will remove legacy bios support, it will technically make its system requirements higher than Windows 11. Yes, I don't consider the arbitary requirements set by MS as actual requirements, because I've seen people ran Windows 11 on some of the earliest x86-64 processors from 2005. The only thing that actually changed with Windows 11 is the removal of 32 bit installation media, which is what MacOS and many Linux distros already did even earlier.

I don't see how. Windows 11 supported configurations require UEFI too. Likewise, 64-bit EFI. Plus Secure Boot, TPM, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. If you want to install on something less than that, you have to modify your installation media or manually initialize registry keys to install it, meaning you're doing something that isn't intended by the software vendor. Good luck with the stability of that system.

Unsupported configurations can have it installed with this workaround but Microsoft says not to expect further software updates for it. Likewise, there are other Linux installs available for 32-bit UEFI or Legacy BIOS, and Fedora can probably be installed on those firmware types with a workaround too (probably more work than Windows, but that's the case with everything due to hardware support for Windows). Just don't expect anyone to not laugh at you when you complain about the lack of stability for running it on hardware that it's not intended for.

[Waethorn]

If they do this, they should switch over to systemd-bootd for a cleaner bootloader. Using grub becomes unnecessary, and their current hybrid boot mechanism of duplicating the esp with boot partition is a mess.

[user1]

Finally!

Too bad that non-UEFI computers were still being sold in 2012-2013...

How does supporting pre-UEFI systems hold back the distro?

[sinepgib]

Not sure how I feel about this. There are still pretty capable pre-UEFI x86-64 systems like Intel Nehalem for example. If Fedora will remove legacy bios support, it will technically make its system requirements higher than Windows 11. Yes, I don't consider the arbitary requirements set by MS as actual requirements, because I've seen people ran Windows 11 on some of the earliest x86-64 processors from 2005. The only thing that actually changed with Windows 11 is the removal of 32 bit installation media, which is what MacOS and many Linux distros already did even earlier.

Well, that is technically the case here as well. You can always install GRUB manually and point it to the right kernel, maybe make some extra manual adjustments. I don't see why the system would stop working.

Regarding the article, I think talking about 2006 hardware as if nothing else shipped a BIOS after that time is a bit inaccurate. I have an old netbook with an ICH7 south bridge (released in 2007) which still shipped BIOS. I've also used a server rack that should have been from the 2010-2012 time frame that only provided BIOS. Not necessarily saying this is the "wrong" thing to do (they're free to maintain or drop whatever they want), but that doesn't mean we should portray things as abandoned much earlier than they really were.

[mr_marmalade]

You should be running CentOS Stream 9 or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (later this month), which will let you squeeze almost 15 years out of hardware that was meant to last 4.

Hardware should only last 4 years? I must have been very lucky with all my hardware thus far. The dust & mould growing on it must be keeping it running beyond its expected service life. Yay!

[stormcrow]

Not sure how I feel about this. There are still pretty capable pre-UEFI x86-64 systems like Intel Nehalem for example. If Fedora will remove legacy bios support, it will technically make its system requirements higher than Windows 11. Yes, I don't consider the arbitary requirements set by MS as actual requirements, because I've seen people ran Windows 11 on some of the earliest x86-64 processors from 2005. The only thing that actually changed with Windows 11 is the removal of 32 bit installation media, which is what MacOS and many Linux distros already did even earlier.

I wouldn't call Intel's Nehalem that capable considering its known CPU bugs. I'd be glad to see some of these 2000 era and before CPUs disappear into the trash heap. I'm not even all that fond of the one Pentium 4-x64 Optiplex I use to read floppy disks even though it's a necessary item having a native floppy controller (as opposed to crappy hit or miss USB connected floppy drives). Nearly everything pre-Haswell had awful IGPs for one thing, but Nehalem had some particularly nasty CPU bugs that has nothing to do with the modern Spectre issues (bad sleep states among other things).

[sinepgib]

How does supporting pre-UEFI systems hold back the distro?

It doesn't, but every little bit of support means a little bit extra work, and it accumulates.
One of the reasons default installs make you go through GRUB even tho UEFI has a quite decent bootloader is that supporting BIOS means supporting GRUB and it's just easier to test a single setup if GRUB fits both bills. There's also persistent random seeds that could create duplication of test cases as that is only supported by using systemd-boot with UEFI. Maybe Clover could allow for that tho.
But yeah, it doesn't hold back the distro in the sense that there's not one thing you can't implement while supporting BIOS.

[sinepgib]

Hardware should only last 4 years? I must have been very lucky with all my hardware thus far. The dust & mould growing on it must be keeping it running beyond its expected service life. Yay!

Same. I _never_ had anything last that little, and I never really had too many issues to have a digital life. Maybe if you're a gamer it's a different story I guess.

[user1]

I wouldn't call Intel's Nehalem that capable considering its known CPU bugs. I'd be glad to see some of these 2000 era and before CPUs disappear into the trash heap. I'm not even all that fond of the one Pentium 4-x64 Optiplex I use to read floppy disks even though it's a necessary item having a native floppy controller (as opposed to crappy hit or miss USB connected floppy drives). Nearly everything pre-Haswell had awful IGPs for one thing, but Nehalem had some particularly nasty CPU bugs that has nothing to do with the modern Spectre issues (bad sleep states among other things).

When I say capable, I mean only performance wise. For example, i7 920 is still a pretty capable CPU today. Idk, what CPU bugs are you talking about, but apart from my main PC, I also have an old Core 2 Quad Q8200 system and it runs any modern OS without any issues.