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.
Regards
Jóhann B.
1.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/CleanupGnomeHiddenBootMenuIntegration
The primary areas of concern I have about Fedora dropping grub2 and BIOS boot support
are:
1. Users that are on systems that do not support UEFI, or that knowingly (or unknowingly)
use BIOS boot on UEFI-capable systems.
These people are likely to form a lasting negative impression of Fedora, as removing BIOS
boot support would ostensibly mean that Fedora no longer runs on their systems (at least
as configured). I have heard that the UEFI implementations on some (typically older)
motherboards can be buggy, so many users may have a legitimate reason to still use BIOS
boot on boards that advertise support for both.
2. How would dropping grub2 affect users that boot multiple operating systems?
What manual steps, if any, would users need to take if they were previously using grub2 to
support booting multiple operating systems. Would this change break existing multi-boot
setups?
3. Virtual machines typically default to BIOS boot.
It's my understanding that libvirt, Virtual Box, Hyper-V (gen1 VMs only?), and many
cloud providers default to using BIOS boot when creating virtual machines. If Fedora no
longer works *by default* with common virtualization stacks I'd imagine many users
will simply choose to no longer run or recommend Fedora.
4. Support documentation for sd-boot
Would this result in changes to how users access the boot menu, select a boot entry, or
edit the kernel command line, etc? These actions of course aren't expected to be
common but when they are needed it tends to be when a user is already experiencing
problems and is under stress. Therefore if there are changes, hopefully these will be
clearly documented to avoid confusion.
5. What does Fedora gain by dropping BIOS boot support?
Perhaps it is obvious to others, but I think it is worth fully spelling out what the
expected benefits are. This would help everyone more clearly see the trade-offs of this
change.