On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 6:01 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
Moving past the Big Three(tm), the actual cloud providers that matter from a Fedora context are the smaller outfits that principally serve Linux users. These are companies like DigitalOcean, Linode (Akamai), Hetzner, VexxHost, and others who graciously do offer Fedora Linux in their platforms. All of their virtualization platforms are BIOS only right now, and getting them to switch requires them to uplift their platforms to support UEFI in the first place.
They may only support Linux users today, but if they want to grow (and while it is possible to survive as a niche service, many see growth as the way to increased revenue/profits (go big or go home)), they are going to get pushed (perhaps kicking and screaming) to support UEFI as at least an alternative moving forward as some of their customers are going to prefer using a single provider, and Windows 11 requires UEFI(*)(**), and it would be a shame if only the big players were eligible for hosting such services(***).
Many of these comments seem to be about the date, not the end state (UEFI)(****), just like 32-bit x86 and armv7. No one wants their personal ox gored, but there will come a time when it will be time to let old systems go.
"We" (and when I say "we", I understand that is mostly not me), are going to have to continue to document (and fix, where "we" have the knowledge) the areas that need improvement for UEFI booting and runtime.
Gary
(*) Technically it is possible to jump through enough hoops to get Windows 11 to run on BIOS only systems, but it is not supported, and may break at any time. Most people prefer something that the vendor supports.
(**) Yes, some may prefer living in a Windows-less world, but the reality is that (especially at business scale) there are services and applications that require Windows today, and will likely require Windows for a number of tomorrows.
(***) Yes, using multiple cloud providers is often advantageous to avoid vendor lock-in and provider failures, but scale (at one provider) can result in savings (both expense, and duplication of work supporting the different providers' services). There is statement by a VC regarding startups which is (essentially) everyone should start by using AWS, and then have a plan to move off when their scale is sufficient (of course, many startups never survive sufficiently long to move off, and others simply prefer to spend their (precious) engineering resources in other ways).
(****) Yes, some hope coreboot/linuxboot can replace UEFI (and it can in some use cases). But unless/until MS embraces it, UEFI is the answer (even if one is still discussing the question that was asked).