Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[Paradigm Shifter]

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.

Absolutely! Once a piece of hardware is abandoned, it should cost companies nothing to provide documentation supporting the continued maintenance by those who desire it.

Sadly most companies think differently.

It's not even that simple, either; I've been trying to get a clock repaired for years (significant family historical and sentimental value) and no one I've queried is even remotely interested in even trying to repair it, and I've offered some fairly over-the-odds sums once or twice. The answer is always "Buy a new one, it's not worth trying to fix." Honestly, it won't be much longer before it's classified as an antique, at which point maybe someone will actually be interested... or a few years after that I will have retired (haha... dreaming, I know) and have the time to try to fix it myself.

[Waethorn]

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.



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.

My response to this is that if you can’t afford a Raspberry Pi, maybe a computer shouldn’t be high on your list of priorities in life.

In the Talmud, it’s explained that if you feign interest in wares that someone is selling, it’s expected that you are going to purchase them. In some cultures, bartering is insulting. There’s a saying: “The price is the price. If you don’t like it, don’t waste my time.”

[torsionbar28]

Have not read all eight pages, but just wanted to add another data point. I have a number of Supermicro H8SGL-F servers with Opteron 6380 and 128 GB of DDR3 ECC. Running Fedora server. These are very capable 64 bit machines from ~2012. Not the speediest CPU by today's standards, but perfectly adequate for the virtual server workloads I'm running on them. Anyhow, they are BIOS only, no option for EFI. I would not be pleased if support were dropped for these.

[Waethorn]

Have not read all eight pages, but just wanted to add another data point. I have a number of Supermicro H8SGL-F servers with Opteron 6380 and 128 GB of DDR3 ECC. Running Fedora server. These are very capable 64 bit machines from ~2012. Not the speediest CPU by today's standards, but perfectly adequate for the virtual server workloads I'm running on them. Anyhow, they are BIOS only, no option for EFI. I would not be pleased if support were dropped for these.

Why would you be running an up-to-date distro on 10-year old hardware then? Software support is supposed to match hardware support. Those systems are way out of the warranty and manufacturer support lifecycle.

[Waethorn]

I can’t play H.264 1080p video on my Amiga 500.

Guess I should complain about Commodore not supporting it anymore.

😫

[openminded]

Long overdue. Godspeed.

[risho]

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.)"

Then don't use fedora. Why the fuck would you use a distro whose mission statement is bleeding edge and breaking backwards compatibility for the sake of moving forward if you needed legacy support for some random hardware? One of if not the first to switch to systemd, first to switch to pipewire, one of the first to work toward sunsetting i386, first to default to wayland by multiple years. This is how fedora has been for as long as I have been following it. If legacy support for a piece of hardware is something you need then you should be using something that isn't fedora. Consider Ubuntu or Debian or RHEL. RHEL 9 will be supported until past 2030. If by the time 2030 rolls around you still require multi-decade dead legacy support options then you are just going to need to consider your options when that time comes.

[johncall]

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.

You should be able to manually update the firmware on the RAID card and install the missing UEFI ROM/OPROM. Most other server vendors like Dell, HP, Cisco, and Lenovo use the same RAID cards and install both ROMs (BIOS & UEFI) as a convenience.

Being able to access the RAID card's settings from the regular F1 screen instead of having to precisely time pressing Ctrl+H or whatever is very helpful to me.

[Paradigm Shifter]

You should be able to manually update the firmware on the RAID card and install the missing UEFI ROM/OPROM. Most other server vendors like Dell, HP, Cisco, and Lenovo use the same RAID cards and install both ROMs (BIOS & UEFI) as a convenience.

Being able to access the RAID card's settings from the regular F1 screen instead of having to precisely time pressing Ctrl+H or whatever is very helpful to me.

Thanks, I'll investigate but when I looked it was already running the latest firmware.

[goosnarrggh]

they stopped supporting 32bit uefi when I just had put fedora on a intel tablet with 32bit uefi

When did that happen? Right now, I am running F35 on a couple of 64-bit Atom tablets that only support 32-bit UEFI and no legacy BIOS support. You stated this as something that happened in the past tense, which has me really confused.