On 30.6.2020 13:56, Igor Raits wrote:
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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.
JBG