Clouds and VPSes [LWN.net]

Clouds and VPSes

Posted Apr 22, 2022 1:06 UTC (Fri) by bartoc (guest, #124262)
In reply to: Clouds and VPSes by rwmj
Parent article: Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

I have never, ever, experienced a UEFI system that was slower to boot in UEFI mode than legacy mode. Things are usually faster because, for example, the firmware won't initialize my SAS expander unless it's actually going to boot off it. I've had several systems where some add-in card with legacy OpRoms would hang the system for over _30 minutes_ on boot if you turned on legacy support.

This applies to laptops, desktops, and server hardware.

I haven't used a system that doesn't support EFI only mode (i.e. no oproms or anything required) for at least 10 years.

In any event I would like fedora to stop silently installing in BIOS mode, I've made that mistake several times and you need to reinstall the whole OS to fix it.

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Clouds and VPSes

Posted Apr 22, 2022 9:35 UTC (Fri) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] (3 responses)

We're talking about VMs, and UEFI is noticeably many times slower to boot.

Clouds and VPSes

Posted Apr 22, 2022 10:52 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Everyone will have different experiences: mine is that UEFI on a VM is still quicker than BIOS - Tianocore and kvm work perfectly well.

BIOS is _dead_ in the sense that new hardware doesn't support it, it's not being developed - and when Linux eventually is forced to move to attestation by market pressure it'll be dead anyway.

Although I've a 25 year old laptop somewhere in my junkpile - I'm hardly expecting to resurrect it - and it's been some years since I've _needed_ BIOS (except for a couple of HP Microservers which are annoying in that firmware is a paid for support contract upgrade).

Clouds and VPSes

Posted Apr 22, 2022 11:30 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

Which environments are you testing this in? It doesn't match my experience at all - we transitioned all of Google's internal cloud desktop environments to UEFI without anyone noticing.

Clouds and VPSes

Posted Apr 24, 2022 11:55 UTC (Sun) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

Google also ( almost to the date ) 2 years ago made Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Shielded VM the default for everyone using Google Compute Engine and provided migration path from on premis uefi based vm images into that environment.