On Wednesday, 06 April 2022 at 21:35, Jared Dominguez wrote:
On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 2:26 PM Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Wed, Apr 6 2022 at 01:57:00 PM -0400, 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.
This seems like a strong assumption to me considering that aside from the largest cloud providers (with whom Red Hat is directly working with on UEFI boot features and bug reports), cloud providers are using off-the-shelf hypervisors that support UEFI boot.
OVH is not providing UEFI boot option at this time. I'd argue they are a large hosting provider.
[...]
I suppose we should consider that all or most of these platforms are likely to drop Fedora as a supported option if we proceed with this change proposal.
Why? VMware vSphere dropped legacy x86 boot support recently too. We already know that Windows 11 requires UEFI. We (Red Hat) are actively working with several cloud providers on UEFI-related features, some of which are not possible with legacy x86 boot. I find it much more likely that smaller cloud providers will update their software to support UEFI rather than drop OS's that require it, at least if they want to remain competitive.
Fedora doesn't have the market share to be able to compel such action. I'm convinced the smaller providers will rather drop Fedora than increase their maintenance burden of supporting both BIOS and UEFI. After all, most Linux users use Ubuntu, which, to my knowledge, is not removing or even deprecating BIOS support.
Regards, Dominik