Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS [LWN.net]

Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

Posted Apr 21, 2022 7:48 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS by fenncruz
Parent article: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

Are the people who champion UEFI willing to put in the work to make it actually work as well or better than BIOS?

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Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

Posted Apr 21, 2022 10:27 UTC (Thu) by leoluk (guest, #97665) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes - there is a ton of ongoing work on EFI in projects like EDKII[1] and the various bootloaders and utilities. Things like TPM-backed attestation and Secure Boot require EFI. Meanwhile, Legacy BIOS is stagnant and only kept around for compatibility reasons.

[1]: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2

Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

Posted Apr 21, 2022 23:35 UTC (Thu) by trini (subscriber, #70570) [Link]

I suspect the coreboot people would like to have a word. I'm a bit surprised this wasn't mentioned in the summary (and I didn't check the thread itself). There is very much an active community around non-UEFI x86-64 firmware support.

Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

Posted Apr 24, 2022 4:37 UTC (Sun) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (1 responses)

EDK2 is only one part of UEFI. In the entire thread, there was no commitment by the proposers to improve the experience with UEFI on Fedora Linux. There are several dimensions there to improve, but the fundamental assumption was that the current experience is fine, when it is clearly not.

Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

Posted Apr 24, 2022 6:48 UTC (Sun) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

Their change proposal is about deprecating legacy BIOS which basically just involves making documentation changes mentioning that UEFI is now a hardware requirement for new Fedora installations on platforms that support it.

The installer still supports installing Fedora on non uefi platforms.
Fedora will still work on non uefi platforms, it's just considered unsupported

What their change proposal effectively just does, is to open up the door for *other* change proposal to make further changes in Fedora which more or less will involve the elimination of the technical debt in Fedora that has been gathered since it's inception around legacy bios support.

At best it flips a switch or two for component defaulting to uefi but the fact is various upstream have already start defaulting to uefi and will eventually do code cleanups that drops any support for legacy bios regardless what downstream "feels" about it.

Those distribution that feel so strongly about it will have to carry and maintain everything themselves, they should not expect upstreams to do that *for them*.

Improving UEFI experience can and should be handled by a different change proposal in Fedora ( not that I'm seeing how since the experience from the installer is not "bad", the rest is relevant to upstream as in no downstream contributor is going to change that, let alone some individuals that are doing change proposal in Fedora, which is just a marketing gimmick for the distribution ).