On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 2:39 PM Tom Seewald <tseew...@gmail.com> 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.
> >
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Jóhann B.
> >
> >
> > 1.
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/CleanupGnomeHiddenBootMenuIntegration
>
> The primary areas of concern I have about Fedora dropping grub2 and BIOS boot
> support are:
>
> 1. Users that are on systems that do not support UEFI, or that knowingly (or
> unknowingly) use BIOS boot on UEFI-capable systems.
>
> These people are likely to form a lasting negative impression of Fedora, as
> removing BIOS boot support would ostensibly mean that Fedora no longer runs
> on their systems (at least as configured). I have heard that the UEFI
> implementations on some (typically older) motherboards can be buggy, so many
> users may have a legitimate reason to still use BIOS boot on boards that
> advertise support for both.
>
> 2. How would dropping grub2 affect users that boot multiple operating systems?
>
> What manual steps, if any, would users need to take if they were previously
> using grub2 to support booting multiple operating systems. Would this change
> break existing multi-boot setups?
What would happen if some of those multiple operating systems do
not support UEFI for whatever reason?
>
> 3. Virtual machines typically default to BIOS boot.
>
> It's my understanding that libvirt, Virtual Box, Hyper-V (gen1 VMs only?),
> and many cloud providers default to using BIOS boot when creating virtual
> machines. If Fedora no longer works *by default* with common virtualization
> stacks I'd imagine many users will simply choose to no longer run or
> recommend Fedora.
I think this is a place to handhold user, not to tell, say,
libvirt it should drop BIOS boot altogether like others in this thread
suggested.
> 4. Support documentation for sd-boot
>
> Would this result in changes to how users access the boot menu, select a boot
> entry, or edit the kernel command line, etc? These actions of course aren't
> expected to be common but when they are needed it tends to be when a user is
> already experiencing problems and is under stress. Therefore if there are
> changes, hopefully these will be clearly documented to avoid confusion.
>
> 5. What does Fedora gain by dropping BIOS boot support?
>
> Perhaps it is obvious to others, but I think it is worth fully spelling out
> what the expected benefits are. This would help everyone more clearly see the
> trade-offs of this change.
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