On 4/10/22 05:50, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
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.
Yes, but the whole point is that it's way too early. Windows 10 still supports not only legacy BIOS, but also i686 (which Fedora has dropped support for in Fedora 31; Fedora 30 was EOL'd in May 2020) and Windows 10 will be supported until at least October 14, 2025. For comparison, Fedora 36 will be EOL'd in May 2023.
"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.
BIOS-only users can stay on Windows 10. They have very little reason to upgrade to Windows 11. It's mostly cosmetic changes to the UI and there's no major software product that requires Windows 11, but doesn't run on Windows 10. Adoption of new Windows versions has always been painstakingly slow, even after the old version is EOL'd, people continue to use it (I know it's a bad idea, but people do it anyway - look at how much time it took for people to upgrade from Windows XP, after it was EOL'd). But Windows 10 is still supported, so it can be used, it's not more dangerous than Windows 11.
So the question is, why should cloud providers care about Windows 11? Long term, yes, they do care, but none of their Windows users are in a hurry to upgrade, they are fine staying on Windows 10 until 2025, there's nothing in Windows 11 that makes it worth upgrading (in my personal opinion), especially not for server/cloud use. I must check this (please correct me if I'm wrong), but I think Windows Server 2019 still supports legacy BIOS and has extended support until January 2029.
(**) 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.
Like I said, Windows 10 supports i686 + Legacy BIOS, as well as x86_64 + Legacy BIOS until at least October 14, 2025.
(***) 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).
I believe the PC-compatible coreboot payloads are the way to go - either coreboot+SeaBIOS or coreboot+TianoCore. I don't know what's the state of TianoCore and whether it works on real hardware. I have one working system with coreboot+SeaBIOS (it's a Chromebook) and I'd like to be able to use it.
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