Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[Paradigm Shifter]

Respectfully, a cutting-edge distro shouldn't have to hold back to cover hardware that hasn't been supported for years. There are LTS distros that handle all the things you're talking about. 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.

My lab just got a new NAS. It's brand new Intel hardware from Supermicro.

If I turn off BIOS support, and only have EFI...

...the 36-disk RAID controller vanishes in a puff of smoke. It requires legacy BIOS.

Oops.

Changes made in Fedora trickle down to more stable OSes, and I'd rather like that machine (and several others) to last way more than four years, possibly replacing some drives along the way.

I find it absolutely shocking that you think hardware was "meant" to last just four years. But I suspect that is a direct result of the throw-away society we have developed in to, where it is easier to throw something away and buy a "new" one than repair the broken thing.

It doesn't seem that big a step from your closing statement and hitting "You will own nothing, and you will be happy. (Or else.)"

Some day, eventually, even that ancient 25+ year old dinosaur running off a BIOS will die. A cap will fail, something will oxidize to the point of not working or enough of a temperature change will break some lead, trace or solder that can't be fixed. It's fun to keep these old relics alive but it's got hobbyist written all over it.

I'd imagine that some day there will come a time when even the most die hard maintainer will retire, die or just stop maintaining whatever code that still supports such old machines and users will have no choice but to run an old distro to make it work. For the same reason we've gone from steam powered trains to Shinkansen is why, eventually, time and progress will obsolete old hardware.

Hobbyist? It's got "government agency" written all over it. Or did NASA throw away all their old kit on the sly?

What about companies/banks still using COBOL and paying COBOL programmers absolute fortunes to maintain the codebase?

It seems to become a trend recently, to depreciate everything. Probably accepted the Great Reset by now

Depressing, ain't it?

if you want to run decade old hardware then maybe a bleeding edge distro that is known to be paving the path toward the future before anyone else and who is the first to deprecate legacy stuff just isn't the distro for you.

Fedora trickles down to RHEL, which has a significant impact on the rest of the Linux ecosystem, e.g.: systemd.

This is really bad and far too early. Whoever came up with this idea doesn't want to deprecate BIOS support, they want to deprecate tens of millions of perfectly working PCs and laptops.

I love how forward-looking Fedora has always been but this is not when you do it. If they go through with the plan, it might also make Fedora a lot less popular and it's not like the distro is well known - Ubuntu and its derivatives have been all the rage in the past decade.

I think Hell just froze over... I agree with birdie.

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.

Not really. I just "decommissioned" my old gaming rig - which I put together 5 years ago. And it wasn't so much decommissioning it, as "I also want to do some work related development and an 8GB GPU ain't cuttin' it."

I'm kind of bitter I just had to (finally) give up on my old laptop. It still works, but I've had no luck finding a replacement battery and despite cleaning the fans out, it runs like an absolute furnace even at idle. Also, 4GB GPU. I really like the replacement, but I do wish AMD would sort out ROCm. So far my attempts to become less dependent on CUDA have been an unmitigated failure.

For user-space applications I suggest you use their AppImages or even Flatpaks (usually in the latest version) rather than distro packages (which tend to break more often).

I'll call AppImage/Flatpak/Snap superior to in-distro or built-from-source when I can run Octave and install various packages I need without having to go through half a dozen ritual sacrifices to get Octave to see build requirements which are installed.

For sandboxing something like a browser, though, it's a good call.

And yet you can build an alternative. With open source, everything is pretty much optional, as long as there's enough interest and will

And money. And the people with money often don't have any vested interest in finding ways to make other peoples things last longer.

Quite the opposite.

See: Sam Vimes' (of Terry Pratchett's Discworld) economic theory of boots.

From the proposal page:

Contingency Plan
Leave things as they are. Code continues to rot.

What?? What's there to rot if there are no modern PCs with BIOS and ADL/Zen 4 systems lack compatibility mode/CSM altogether? It works, it doesn't need to be maintained. Open Source developers sometimes say crazy things. It's like saying that true/false utilities from coreutils need maintenance.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Like politicians whipping up hatred toward a particular organisation, group or individual.

Control is easier when fear is a motivating factor.

I'm rather surprised by the number of posters here who argue that it will make it impossible to run Fedora on 10+ years old machines. Why is it a problem, really? For one thing they don't HAVE to run Fedora, there are other distros better suited for that purpose.

This is true.

...RPi4 which is a more powerful computer than those ~2010 boxes and is better supported by current distros.

This is false.

The 2020 Celeron CPUs are a touch faster than a Q6600 (a 2007 CPU) and absolutely slaughters an RPi4 in everything except LibreOffice PDF creation.

The RPi4 is a lot lower power, though. Honestly, I like my RPi4 for headless tasks like monitoring or PiHoling things... but my excursions into using it as a desktop (even just for e-mail/browsing) was a painful experience I do not wish to return to. It felt like doing everything in molasses.

Although I think I might have a go with Gentoo on it again when I finally get a new 'net connection.

[birdie]

Sonadow explicitly stated they did NOT mess with the boot media.

Boot up via a pristine ISO directly from Microsoft. Open a terminal window. Add two registry keys in the terminal. Install. Done.

Microsoft does not actually block anyone from installing Windows 11 on hardware that supported Windows 10. They just don't officially 'support' it so you have to tell it to do so via the registry keys that Microsoft added themselves.

If Microsoft did not want people doing that, then those registry keys would not exist.

Overriding registry settings is exactly that: messing with the boot media.

Registry in Windows is no different than overriding kernel boot parameters, or using sysctl or editing files in /etc. Don't tell me it's all "pristine" in this case. Next you'll tell me that modifying inf files or disabling drivers signatures verification in Windows (bcdedit.exe /set nointegritychecks on) is also not messing with it.

Microsoft actively doesn't want people to do that and they might have left the door open temporarily for people to try and taste the new OS.

[Sonadow]

Last time I checked, both System76 and Purism were selling UEFI-free systems with open source firmware (coreboot) that used a SeaBIOS payload to load GRUB. These systems are intentionally have no UEFI bloat in order to reduce complexity and attack surface. Is Fedora against open firmware now?

S76 uses Coreboot with TianoCore which is a full UEFI implementation.

Purism is the only odd one out that insists on being shortsighted by using the SeaBIOS payload.

Anyway, I couldn't care less about the system firmware. I will take AMI, Insyde, HP, Dell, Intel, etc UEFI firmware anytime, without even any second thoughts even, as long as it does the job of hardware initialization properly and allows me to easily various things such as boot device order, usb modes, load Secure Boot keys and so on.

[Waethorn]

"Meant to????" According to whom? Microsoft?

No: the manufacturers.

[Waethorn]

S76 uses Coreboot with TianoCore which is a full UEFI implementation.

Purism is the only odd one out that insists on being shortsighted by using the SeaBIOS payload.

Anyway, I couldn't care less about the system firmware. I will take AMI, Insyde, HP, Dell, Intel, etc UEFI firmware anytime, without even any second thoughts even, as long as it does the job of hardware initialization properly and allows me to easily various things such as boot device order, usb modes, load Secure Boot keys and so on.

Do they use TianoCore? I thought they had their native Linux kernel boot stuff with just Coreboot alone.

[sinepgib]

And money. And the people with money often don't have any vested interest in finding ways to make other peoples things last longer.

Quite the opposite.

See: Sam Vimes' (of Terry Pratchett's Discworld) economic theory of boots.

Of course. But interested communities are comprised of relevant numbers of people, which means they can pool resources. Now, if what we want is free meals, I've got bad news. But time and skills should suffice to support software. It's time that you buy with money in that case.
Plus, I don't see why we always expect someone else to make our stuff last longer. It's our stuff, why would they care. We should. As long as they don't get in the way, I think it's fair-ish. And open source stops them from really getting in the way.
Not only that, but if we're claiming stuff doesn't bit rot and what not, it should be damned cheap to support it ourselves, right? If it isn't, maybe some of our premises were wrong after all.

everybody can afford a RPi4

Definitely not everybody. Certainly in my country there's a lot of people who don't have a dime to spare and need to use whatever they already have for the foreseeable future.

I mean, I agree that nobody is forced to use Fedora, but get out of your bubble.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Of course. But interested communities are comprised of relevant numbers of people, which means they can pool resources. Now, if what we want is free meals, I've got bad news. But time and skills should suffice to support software. It's time that you buy with money in that case.
Plus, I don't see why we always expect someone else to make our stuff last longer. It's our stuff, why would they care. We should. As long as they don't get in the way, I think it's fair-ish. And open source stops them from really getting in the way.
Not only that, but if we're claiming stuff doesn't bit rot and what not, it should be damned cheap to support it ourselves, right? If it isn't, maybe some of our premises were wrong after all.

While I agree, companies are working really damned hard to make it so that you don't own what you have paid for.

Not just in computers, either; see the growing Right to Repair movement.

[sinepgib]

While I agree, companies are working really damned hard to make it so that you don't own what you have paid for.

Not just in computers, either; see the growing Right to Repair movement.

I'm aware. In a different thread I mentioned I think all hardware should be mandated by law to include at the very least the relevant programming interfaces documented. I don't expect a company to support my hardware forever. I expect them to respect my right to do it myself, as I own the piece of equipment.

[Waethorn]

My lab just got a new NAS. It's brand new Intel hardware from Supermicro.

If I turn off BIOS support, and only have EFI...

...the 36-disk RAID controller vanishes in a puff of smoke. It requires legacy BIOS.

Oops.

Changes made in Fedora trickle down to more stable OSes, and I'd rather like that machine (and several others) to last way more than four years, possibly replacing some drives along the way.

I find it absolutely shocking that you think hardware was "meant" to last just four years. But I suspect that is a direct result of the throw-away society we have developed in to, where it is easier to throw something away and buy a "new" one than repair the broken thing.

It doesn't seem that big a step from your closing statement and hitting "You will own nothing, and you will be happy. (Or else.)"



Hobbyist? It's got "government agency" written all over it. Or did NASA throw away all their old kit on the sly?

What about companies/banks still using COBOL and paying COBOL programmers absolute fortunes to maintain the codebase?



Depressing, ain't it?



Fedora trickles down to RHEL, which has a significant impact on the rest of the Linux ecosystem, e.g.: systemd.


I think Hell just froze over... I agree with birdie.



Not really. I just "decommissioned" my old gaming rig - which I put together 5 years ago. And it wasn't so much decommissioning it, as "I also want to do some work related development and an 8GB GPU ain't cuttin' it."

I'm kind of bitter I just had to (finally) give up on my old laptop. It still works, but I've had no luck finding a replacement battery and despite cleaning the fans out, it runs like an absolute furnace even at idle. Also, 4GB GPU. I really like the replacement, but I do wish AMD would sort out ROCm. So far my attempts to become less dependent on CUDA have been an unmitigated failure.


I'll call AppImage/Flatpak/Snap superior to in-distro or built-from-source when I can run Octave and install various packages I need without having to go through half a dozen ritual sacrifices to get Octave to see build requirements which are installed.

For sandboxing something like a browser, though, it's a good call.



And money. And the people with money often don't have any vested interest in finding ways to make other peoples things last longer.

Quite the opposite.

See: Sam Vimes' (of Terry Pratchett's Discworld) economic theory of boots.



Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Like politicians whipping up hatred toward a particular organisation, group or individual.

Control is easier when fear is a motivating factor.


This is true.


This is false.

The 2020 Celeron CPUs are a touch faster than a Q6600 (a 2007 CPU) and absolutely slaughters an RPi4 in everything except LibreOffice PDF creation.

The RPi4 is a lot lower power, though. Honestly, I like my RPi4 for headless tasks like monitoring or PiHoling things... but my excursions into using it as a desktop (even just for e-mail/browsing) was a painful experience I do not wish to return to. It felt like doing everything in molasses.

Although I think I might have a go with Gentoo on it again when I finally get a new 'net connection.

ARM GPU support in Linux desktop environments sucks.

ARM is all about IP. Android “respects” that, even though they use the Linux kernel. ARM SoC makers refuse to give any notice to Linux and will continue to only write closed Android driver modules for their GPU cores. If someone asked me about what to get for a low-power ARM desktop computer, I’d have to recommend a Mac mini. If they wanted to use open-source software, I’d recommend they get an Intel or AMD system. RISC-V is underpowered, immature and widely unsupported, and Power/OpenPower systems are too expensive. I wouldn’t recommend those unless your job is development for that platform as they make for pretty poor general-purpose desktops.

The other issue with ARM is the lack of standardized firmware interface and custom first-stage bootloaders. SystemReady ES certified systems provide UEFI with *some* ACPI support, but it still doesn’t solve the driver issue.

UEFI is just a simplified OS. Components have what they refer to as “drivers” in the UEFI firmware, which used to be called BIOS ROM’s. In an ideal world, if companies started including a complete set of hardware component drivers in the firmware with a universal access method, the OS could address the hardware without needing its own drivers, and you could say goodbye to OS hardware support issues. But the software platform vendors (and the firmware vendors too) would never agree on how the firmware should be accessible, so this will probably never happen. Too bad too, since it would make it less development work to support a new piece of hardware, and less headaches for users.

[Waethorn]

While I agree, companies are working really damned hard to make it so that you don't own what you have paid for.

Not just in computers, either; see the growing Right to Repair movement.

The entire software industry and media/print industry started this with the dreaded “license agreement”. You don’t own any of it.