Am 21.05.2023 um 15:36 schrieb Neal Gompa <ngompa13@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.org/thread/K5YKCQU3YVCTMSBHLP4AOQWIE3AHWCKC/
[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). 



--
Peter Boy
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pboy
PBoy@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