On Tuesday, June 30, 2020 6:34:27 AM MST 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.
This is simply false. I'm currently writing this email on a ThinkPad X200
Tablet, which does not support UEFI. I can get dropping x86 support, but
dropping BIOS boot support?
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.
Good for them. That just means that, on those next-generation systems, once
they're out, people will be using UEFI boot.
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.
What does BIOS boot have to do with 32 bit operating systems? RAID HBAs will
also continue to work, though you may not be able to boot from them. Network
cards will *also* continue to work, you just might not be able to PXE.
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.
So that people can continue to boot their systems, and so that users and cloud
providers can still boot Fedora VMs. Why in the world would GRUB2 be dropped?
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.
This would mean that every single one of the systems that I own, every system
on Linode, DigitalOcean, and most other cloud providers would cease to be able
to boot Fedora. I'm very much against this proposal.
--
John M. Harris, Jr.