On 30.6.2020 17:47, Robbie Harwood wrote:
Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <johan...@gmail.com> writes:
On 30.6.2020 13:56, Igor Raits wrote:
On Tue, 2020-06-30 at 13:34 +0000, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
Given Hans proposal [1] introduced systemd/grub2/Gnome upstream
changes it beg the question if now would not be the time to stop
supporting booting in legacy bios mode and move to uefi only
supported boot which has been available on any common intel based
x86 platform since atleast 2005.
Now in 2017 Intel's technical marketing engineer Brian Richardson
revealed in a presentation that the company will require UEFI Class
3 and above as in it would remove legacy BIOS support from its
client and datacenter platforms by 2020 and one might expect AMD to
follow Intel in this regard.
So Intel platforms produced this year presumably will be unable to
run 32-bit operating systems, unable to use related software (at
least natively), and unable to use older hardware, such as RAID HBAs
(and therefore older hard drives that are connected to those HBAs),
network cards, and even graphics cards that lack UEFI-compatible
vBIOS (launched before 2012 – 2013) etc.
This post is just to gather feed back why Fedora should still
continue to support legacy BIOS boot as opposed to stop supporting
it and potentially drop grub2 and use sd-boot instead.
Share your thoughts and comments on how such move might affect you
so feedback can be collected for the future on why such a change
might be bad, how it might affect the distribution and scope of such
change can be determined for potential system wide proposal.
I think there are many people still install OS in the legacy mode,
but I don't really have numbers. One thing we should definitely do if
we deprecate legacy BIOS is to properly warn users that still use
this configuration, develop tooling for them if possible for
migration and do not allow upgrades that will simply break their
system.
The use of legacy or uefi are changes that users have to manually
change themselves in their bios from manufactures default
settings. There is no tool that can do that for them or migrate those
settings however users should be able to change this for hardware
around 2010.
The Installer would have to try to detect and make a choise sd-boot (
If settings equall UEFI ) or grub2 ( If setting not equals UEFI )
depending on it's results.
As an example here's the BIOS/UEFI history for Apple hardware.
2012 and older models only support legacy BIOS Mode
2013-2014 models support both EFI and BIOS with the default setting
being set on BIOS
2015 and later models only support EFI
Different manufacturers have different timelines and different default
settings but I think it's safe to presume from this year onwards they
will all drop the legacy support and default to UEFI.
I don't think it contradicts your point that "this stuff is really
complicated", but my desktop is a 2009/2010 MacPro 4,1 running Fedora
booted using EFI. (I didn't ask it one way or the other - this is how
anaconda installed it for me.)
I was bit surprised by this given that I got that EFI Apple integration
timeframe from the OS-X forum but further digging through Apple
documents has revealed that UEFI has been supported since 2006 on Mac
computers with an Intel-based CPU [1]. So Anaconda did the right thing ;)
JBG
1. https://support.apple.com/en-is/guide/security/seced055bcf6/web
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