Am 21.05.2023 um 16:06 schrieb Neal Gompa
<ngompa13(a)gmail.com>:
On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 9:58 AM Peter Boy <pboy(a)uni-bremen.de> wrote:
>
>
>
> Am 21.05.2023 um 15:36 schrieb Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com>:
>
> Hey all,
>
> I was chatting with Marcin Juszkiewicz about U-Boot on ARM wrt its
> "generic UEFI boot" feature where it can execute UEFI applications. We
> use this capability for Fedora on ARM platforms to go from the utterly
> barebones and weird initialization processes for various boards to a
> UEFI-like environment so we can boot Fedora somewhat normally.
>
> It occurred to me during that conversation that it might be possible
> to use this to simplify what we need to care about for x86 too. Last
> year, the Red Hat Bootloader team wanted to start a deprecation
> process for BIOS[1] and the Fedora Cloud WG has been interested in it
> for longer[2].
>
> At least from the Cloud WG side, it's been determined that completely
> removing BIOS support is functionally impossible for the next few
> years because of AWS and smaller cloud providers not universally
> supporting UEFI (and we are still trying to convince them to change
> their minds on this...). And I still have plenty of hardware with
> broken UEFI implementations that require CSM boot to support Linux.
>
> But could we use U-Boot to fill in this gap so these systems still
> work? We'd then treat x86 like ARM (if no UEFI, use U-Boot UEFI).
>
>
> [1]:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.o...
> [2]:
https://pagure.io/cloud-sig/issue/345
>
>
>
> Would be interesting to have a proof of concept, e.g. a server VM image.
>
> However, when I look at the ARM SBC UEFI, some improvement would be desirable. At the
moment, there is only a crumpled UEFI image flying across the screen, without any
intervention option (which is OK for SBC, but probably not for a „real“ server).
>
U-Boot does have a UEFI shell, though for our purposes, it's not that
important. U-Boot would merely allow us to jump into an environment
that executes the boot manager EFI binary (grub2, rEFInd, sd-boot).
If it's possible, it's something Fedora Cloud would probably adopt
pretty quickly.
I'm curios. I would like to grab it and try to create an experimental Server VM.
--
Peter Boy
PBoy(a)fedoraproject.org
Timezone: CET (UTC+1) / CEST /UTC+2)
Fedora Server Edition Working Group member
Fedora Docs team contributor and board member
Java developer and enthusiast