On 30.6.2020 17:47, Robbie Harwood wrote:
Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <johannbg(a)gmail.com> writes:
> On 30.6.2020 13:56, Igor Raits wrote:
>> 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.
I don't think it contradicts your point that "this stuff is really
complicated", but my desktop is a 2009/2010 MacPro 4,1 running Fedora
booted using EFI. (I didn't ask it one way or the other - this is how
anaconda installed it for me.)
I was bit surprised by this given that I got that EFI Apple integration
timeframe from the OS-X forum but further digging through Apple
documents has revealed that UEFI has been supported since 2006 on Mac
computers with an Intel-based CPU [1]. So Anaconda did the right thing ;)
JBG
1.
https://support.apple.com/en-is/guide/security/seced055bcf6/web