Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[Sonadow]

Hey, I could give you $1000 and you will show me how to use the official Windows 11 ISO to install Windows on a system without Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Can you stop?

From the horse's mouth:

• System firmware UEFI, Secure Boot capable
• TPM Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0.
• Graphics card Compatible with DirectX 12 or later with WDDM 2.0 driver.

Fedora 37 even with a possible EFI requirement (I'm 99.9% sure it will be cancelled) is nowhere near what Windows 11 requires.

Microsoft is not honest about the Graphics card though. Windows even at version 11 has a perfectly working Microsoft Basic Display Adapter driver which supports most VESA compatible GPUs.

$1000?? Really? Because I can, and because I used the official ISO from Microsoft to install Windows 11 on a number of computers with no TPM 2.0 and on old unsupported processors such as Haswell and Ivy Bridge.

You just need to cold boot the ISO, enter the Windows 11 installer GUI and add two registry keys. No messing with DLLs or patching anything in the ISO required.

[sinepgib]

The last version of this distro with this loader: http://ftp.vim.org/pub/os/Linux/dist...inux/i386/7.3/
A Wikipedia article in Russian: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPLinux

The distro died around 2009, so there's very little information.

I've digged a little, here's what I've found out:

• This bootloader was closed source and written by SWsoft Pte. which was later renamed into Parallels.
• A very similarly looking bootloader was developed by Acronis, maybe it's a shared/reused product, it is called Acronis OS Selector. Version 8 looks almost the same as ASPLinux Loader.

Acronis and Parallels have the same co-founders, Maxim Tsyplyaev and Serguei Beloussov (Serg Bell), so I wonder if these are the same product or not. Very well might be.

Thanks! Very interesting.

[birdie]

$1000?? Really? Because I can, and because I used the official ISO from Microsoft to install Windows 11 on a number of computers with no TPM 2.0 and on old unsupported processors such as Haswell and Ivy Bridge.

You just need to cold boot the ISO, enter the Windows 11 installer GUI and add two registry keys. No messing with DLLs or patching anything in the ISO required.

So, messing with the boot media. OK.

[calc]

So, messing with the boot media. OK.

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.

[jacob]

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. Besides, I absolutely understand and respect people who can't afford to buy all new PC hardware (we've all been there at some point), but if it comes to that, everybody can afford a RPi4 which is a more powerful computer than those ~2010 boxes and is better supported by current distros.

[calc]

but if it comes to that, everybody can afford a RPi4 which is a more powerful computer than those ~2010 boxes

That's not even remotely true.

UEFI wasn't even partially rolled out until during Sandy Bridge (2011-2013).

A Sandy Bridge i7-2700K desktop chip from 2011 is roughly 5x faster than a RPi 4. And there were even faster workstation chips.

A RPi 4 chip is roughly the speed of a high end P4 from ~ 2003, or a low end Core 2 Duo chip from 2006.

A lower end current gen Intel CPU is only slightly faster than a i7-2700K. So a Sandy Bridge i7-2700K with 32GB ram is plenty powerful still.

There is very little reason to upgrade if you have a good system that was made in the past decade or so, other than forced obsolescence.

[Sonadow]

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.

Actually, I suspect Microsoft doesn't want users to do that at all. If you know what those registry keys are called, it becomes quite clear why.

It's just that Microsoft never expected that talented hackers would discover what those keys are and publish them to the world that quickly.

The only semi-official registry key (i say semi-official because Microsoft has already removed that information from their KBs) that Microsoft revealed to the world to bypass the hardware restrictions is the MoSetup key, and that is used when you perform an in-place upgrade of Windows 11 from within a working installation of Windows. The keys that are used to perform a clean install from an unmodified bootable image (i.e.: the one I used) was never disclosed by Microsoft at all; you got to really search quite hard for it because most search results only link to sites that republish the instructions for using the MoSetup key

[PenguinWrangler]

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?

[jaypatelani]

Thank God I am used to NetBSD now

[frytaped]

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?

System76 systems use the tianocore payload of coreboot which provides a complete UEFI implementation including secure boot