On Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 8:49 AM, Ed Greshko ed.greshko@greshko.com wrote:
On 09/24/16 22:39, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
I have an ASUS R503U which originally came with a Windoze8.1 installation. I have no need for it so I scrapped it. I also, consequently have no need for EFI.
I was wondering if it is required for me to install Fedora 24 on an EFI system. I can not seem to get out of EFI so maybe what I am looking to do is not possible. Is it possible to do the same in an old grub setup.
Many thanks and best wishes,
FWIW, google "asus r503u disable uefi" and you'll find how to disable uefi for ASUS hardware. It seems it can be done, just that you need the "magic" incantation to get it done. :-)
I really wish people would qualify their answers rather than giving people razor blades like this and telling them to go play on the freeway.
UEFI!=BIOS
A system withe UEFI cannot have UEFI turned off. That the manufacturers treat their users with contempt by lying to them with UEFI Enable/Disable switches does not mean it's true this is possible. That feature just enables a compatibility support module to present an emulated BIOS to the OS instead of a UEFI interface. It's meant for legacy OS's that don't grok UEFI, and Fedora is not such a legacy OS. What you give up with the CSM depends on the implementation, there's no way to know this in advance without a lot of testing. But my testing has revealed much worse performance across the board: SSD's are slower because they're seen as IDE drives instead of using AHCI, and likewise the power management for GPU, USB, and CPU p states is also limited. Again, it depends on the hardware.
So you're better off a.) keeping the firmware up to date, as there's a metric s tonne of bugs compared to BIOS based firmware b.) using its defaults and otherwise just leave it alone and install Fedora.