Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
lwn.net
lwn.net
The "standard" for BIOSes was at first the IBM PC ROS's Reference Manual, and later the PS/2 Reference. Naturally, many vendors failed to implement it correctly. But the problem with EFI is the same. Still hoping that someday, EFI netboot support will be something usable.
I once considered using EFI as a basis for booting some of my bare-metal works, but:
- it requires the GPT partitioning scheme, which in turn requires handling of UUIDs. Their endianess is not little, big - its mixed. mixed in the same value. This is a quirk inherited from Microsoft.
- EFI system partition is the FAT file system, which is an FS that is even older than the legacy BIOS. Many gory details. Legacy from Microsoft.
- EFI "executables" are actually windows executables, who still start with the 'MZ' header from MS-DOS. The real mode code for displaying "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" is, depending on the toolchain, sometimes still included. Also legacy from Microsoft.
I don't see why Linux users should be enthusiastic about adopting this.
While actually not removing bios support won't allow you to get rid of the aformentionned MS techs such as fat support.
Having said that I think this is a wee bit early.
I never said that.
I said removing bios support allows you to remove anything that provides bios support and that choosing to not remove it won't allow you to get rid of the EFI dependencies so it is a moot point to talk about old techs used by EFI.
[1] Some features would be broken, like recognising whether the system had booted successfully
That is done by the maintainers of the bootloader packages.
What Fedora presumably intends is to remove all bootloader packages from the installation image.
In that case, the Linux kernel can be booted only by using its included EFI stub.
One less package in the installation image might be claimed to imply less maintenance work for Fedora, but in any case such maintenance work has nothing to do with the work done for maintaining legacy code.
So the choice is between adopting it and keeping BIOS indefinitely, or adopting it and at some point in the future dropping BIOS.
Especially what replacement do you propose that works with the kind of typical hardware that non-specialty linux distros like Fedora want to support?
Intel systems make up a large chunk of the hardware Fedora is used on, and as far as I can tell they're all-in on EFI.
So Fedora has to use EFI to be able to boot on Intel systems.
Nevertheless, the option to enable the legacy BIOS booting can be quite hard to find in the BIOS menus, which may deceive many into believing that a system does not support legacy BIOS booting, even when it actually does support it.
On work computers belonging to a company, the BIOS configuration may be locked, so it might not be possible for the users to enable legacy BIOS booting.
Never noticed until I wanted to boot memtest.
It’s possible that I missed it, but Google results didn’t look promising either.
> Intel stopped shipping the last vestiges of BIOS support in 2020 (as have other vendors, and Apple and Microsoft), so this is clearly the way things are heading - and therefore aligns with Fedora's "First" objective.
You may not have seen many computers yet without legacy BIOS compatibility but this is going to be the norm for new computers very soon.
However, it was a model launched in the second half of 2020. It is indeed possible that the models introduced since 2021 might omit the legacy BIOS booting support.
Others have pointed out that the CSM is no longer being shipped. The CSM is the "Compatibility Support Module" and its a UEFI shim driver that adds the legacy bios INTx operations to a UEFI implementation.
So, most people booting in BIOS mode on hardware built in the past 15 years or so are actually running UEFI with an extra shim.
Many systems get by just fine with a minimal ELF or multiboot loader and a firmware-provided devicetree specification. Dynamic hardware enumeration is performed by every OS anyway, the only hardware that must be initialized is the bootloader/kernel storage.
For the x86 platform, this could be implemented via coreboot (libreboot always reads to me as lib-reboot) with a multiboot payload.
That would be a massive step backwards in hardware support.
Like I said: They don't really have the option of not supporting EFI.
Alternatively they can support EFI and OpenFirmware, but that increases the number of supported paths instead of decreasing them.
The distribution needs to do almost nothing to support either EFI or the legacy BIOS or any other booting method.
That is the job of a bootloader package, not of the Linux distribution. For example I am using syslinux as the bootloader for all my computers, while grub is another example of a frequently used bootloader (but which seems to be excessively complex in comparison with syslinux).
I assume that by supporting only EFI Fedora means that they will remove all bootloaders from their installation image, so that the Linux kernel will be launched by its EFI stub.
I do not know about other bootloaders, but an installed syslinux package occupies only a few megabytes, maybe 10 megabytes at most, so deleting it cannot provide much space for anything else.
I cannot see how deleting a bootloader package may be claimed to be a significant simplification for the maintenance effort of the Fedora distribution.
2. They no longer need to support bios booting in the forums - no asking "how do you boot this? Bios, EFI? Have you tried the other?", no telling people "EFI is required for feature X"
3. They no longer need to maintain the bios boot documentation
4. They no longer need to maintain the bios path in the installer/boot media
5. They no longer need to test the bios paths (or hope they don't break and be ashamed if they don't)
6. This makes it easier to switch to a EFI-only default bootloader (instead of Grub 2, which can do both)
Is this massive? No, it's possible to keep maintaining BIOS support. But it's not just freeing space on the package mirrors either.
Grub 2 is complex to configure, but there are other bootloaders that are much easier to configure, e.g. syslinux.
Restricting the boot method to EFI does not reduce the need for documentation in any way.
The user must still be instructed to enter the BIOS setup and verify whether their computer is not configured to boot in legacy mode, which would prevent booting. Also the user must be instructed to enter the BIOS setup even if the EFI mode is used, because the installation media might not boot anyway, because a wrong boot order is configured for EFI booting, and it must be changed.
The most complex part of the installation is not the booting, but identifying the device where Fedora should be installed, which might be needed to be reformatted and repartitioned.
So a lot of documentation is needed in any case, for novice users.
Removing the booting in legacy mode increases the chances that the installation media will not boot without the user having to modify the BIOS setup, so it increases the chances of the user having to search support in the forums.
~~Yes but syslinux is bios-only. So if you have to support EFI too (and you do because there's EFI-only hardware), you now either need to support syslinux and an EFI bootloader, or a bootloader that supports both like Grub 2.~~
Edit: The article seems to suggest that syslinux can be removed if bios boot is no longer supported. I read that as it being bios-only, but it seems to support EFI?
>Restricting the boot method to EFI does not reduce the need for documentation in any way.
You still need documentation, yes. But you no longer need any documentation for booting with BIOS.
You no longer need to say "X is only supported in EFI, if you boot via BIOS you need to do Y" or anything like that, and keep those parts updated.
The part of the docs that says "To boot EFI, do X. To boot BIOS, do Y" can be cut down to "To boot Fedora, ensure X".
That is a reduction in the amount of documentation.
No other bootloader is needed.
I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of effort the bootloader and hardware enablement teams who work on Fedora put in to making _systems boot Linux at all_.
Not really, none of those ecosystems has a fraction of the device variation that x86 has. When they do (arm) its a giant mess of incompatibility and non working hardware. Modern DT's are basically still tied to the linux kernel the same way that the old arm/platform descriptions tied firmware id's to individual kernel configurations. Which is why the answer to so many arm problems is "match your DT to the kernel revision", god help you if your trying to multiboot a *bsd/etc as well.
PS: Openfirmware is basically dead, that might have been a valid answer in 1998, but even IBM/etc provide alternative boot mechanisms for linux/PPC at this point. The only thing that comes close to a current replacement is UEFI.
However, the vast majority of server or desktop motherboards and of laptops still have the option for legacy BIOS booting, even if the option may be difficult to find in the BIOS menus.
I have about a dozen servers, desktops and laptops and I have configured all of them to use legacy BIOS booting, because EFI booting does not have any advantage, only disadvantages.
It would have been very easy to replace the ugly legacy BIOS booting method with a simple and clean method for booting, but unfortunately those who made the EFI specification have failed to achieve this goal.
For an already installed system it doesn't really matters, so the point is moot here.
But for the new systems setup I would always prefer a UEFI (with or without SecureBoot) because it allows to expose the HID management of the onboard/expansion board controllers, a proper way to return to the management/boot menu in the case of the failed boot.
Sure, it doesn't always work good, but neither BIOS/CMS.
ME security vulnerabilities cannot be fixed in many cases, and it is an intolerable risk for some.
If you insist on a system that does not run ME at all, then the best you can run is a Core 2 Quad x9650 on BIOS.
Be mindful of what you are losing when you deprecate that machine.
Viceversa, it is possible with some loaders to boot BIOS from GPT (not easy-peasy or straightforward but it can be done).
As well, the FAT is only a requisite if there is not an EFI driver for the filesystem, as an example some motherboards and RUFUS provide a NTFS driver that allows booting from NTFS volumes under UEFI.
Still, while in theory GPT and UEFI have a few advantages, there is not in practice (yet) any meaningful reason to remove support to BIOS, though lately a number of notebooks have UEFI firmware only (no CSM aka BIOS), I cannot see how removing an option/choice from a distro can be a good thing.
Hint: download the latest version of Rufus, point it to a windows 11 iso and select the "Extended installation" mode. The result will happily install itself onto an MBR partition.
I performed an upgrade (!) of a windows 10 installation to windows 11 in this manner; I'm writing from this SSD right now.
PS C:\Users\alexa> $(get-disk | ? {$_.IsSystem}).PartitionStyle; [System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version
MBR
Major Minor Build Revision
----- ----- ----- --------
10 0 22000 0- FAT is old, and FAT is well-supported by basically anything, and what features do you want in the partition that contains your bootloader that FAT doesn't support?
- Yeah in an ideal universe we wouldn't have to deal with PE binaries and we wouldn't have to deal with the Windows 64-bit calling convention for jumping into the firmware and also we've solved all of this shit and it just isn't a big deal any more. We can look at any platform and complain about the implementation details, but at least this one is better documented than the BIOS interface ever was.
In summary: Linux has to boot on computers that exist, and most computers that exist have UEFI. The Linux community has had the opportunity to make meaningful improvements to the UEFI spec in a way that wasn't true with BIOS. UEFI isn't ideal, but it's better than what came before in this respect.
[1] Partitions could be identified as "Linux", but that gave you no information about what they were or where they should be mounted. Current systemd-driven development has allowed us to define the partition mount point as part of the GPT data, which means they can be automatically mounted in the correct place without static configuration about partition layout
Well, I'd love to be able to drop a bunch of 8GB (notably FAT doesn't support files this big) LiveDVD disk images on a bare file system and see them in the computer's built-in boot-menu immediately. I already enjoy the fact I don't need a traditional boot loader (like GRUB) to handle multi-OS as I can have 2 independent EFI boot partitions (one for Windows and one for Linux) and use the computer's boot menu too choose which to boot from.
Ideally the whole OS should be just a read-only boot image and a traditional partition should only be used for config/data files IMHO.
ExFAT can support those. You could also use the UDF file system.
And ext has plenty of documentation and they haven't implemented that either.
So I think keeping down the software complexity is the more likely method. Down to
1. The limited software investment these companies make (often just buying and reskinning firmware from AMI)
2. The limited space available on the ROMs due to hardware cost savings (e.g. companies have had to drop GUIs or support for less popular APUs to add support for new generations of mainstream CPU in firmware updates)
Although very complex and very undocumented, NTFS has actually been adopted very widely and quite reliably. Most of the pre-smart TVs and set-top-boxes can read FAT and NTFS USB drives which makes NTFS the only choice if you want movies exceeding 4 GiBs.
> I would rather use Ext4 everywhere for everything. Is the problem preventing wide adoption of Ext4 GPL?
The BSDs don't support ext{2,3,4} particularly well, and Linux doesn't support FFS/UFS particularly well. I mean, there's support for these things, but it's far from complete or perfect and it's taken a long time.
It's just a fair amount of effort to implement filesystems well, and there's very little tolerance for errors. Ext4 isn't spectacularly complicated, but it's not exactly a simple FS either. I think that has more to do with lack of support than anything else: lots of effort for not all that much practical benefit.
Pop!Os uses systemd-boot (formerly gummi-boot) by default if you're on an UEFI system, and only falls back to GRUB for legacy bios.
Arch is also much easier to setup on systemd-boot.
The issue is that GRUB still has a very compelling support matrix - it'll work basically everywhere, and with most all configurations. So if you're already running a batteries included distro, where someone else is doing most of the configuration and the downstream systems are hugely variable (old consumer hardware) - then GRUB still makes the most sense.
Different systems have different constraints. For example, loading the firmware interface on my systems so it can present a boot menu is way, way slower than rEFInd or Grub. And presents an ugly menu in a non-native resolution for my monitors. And doesn't let me override kernel parameters adhocly at boot time if needed (thought it has been a number of years since I have, I'm reluctant to let go of the option).
You don't need 2 EFI boot partitions for this -- you can have multiple boot loaders in the same EFI partition, each with its own entry in the boot menu. In fact, this is how I boot: the default entry boots the linux kernel directly from the EFI partition (some UEFI implementations require the kernel to have a .efi extension, others don't), and I have separate fallback entries for refind and shellx64 in case I need to boot with different kernel parameters.
LVM appears to solve this issue as well as the related issue of only supporting a limited number of partitions in BIOS.
The only snag is swap, which I don't believe can be on a subvolume.
vgchange is a struggle for me, from the first time I saw it in HP-UX.
Linux can make swap a regular file, even. It doesn't need to be a partition.
Google result shows: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap#Swap_file
The problem is less about linux being capable of encrypting/protecting the swap file and more around being able to assure that is true. So like many Linux kernel issues recently its less technical, more political.
So, as I mentioned previously its entirely possible with off the shelf distro's to enable encrypted swap, the average user just has to choose between hibernate, assuring the swap is secure, and secure boot. Its a bit irritating, but seems to be low priority as the focus seems to be on suspend or hibernate without secure boot.
there's also some limitations, see https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#swapf...
Atomic updates and not getting corrupted if the power is pulled/lost while the filesystem is being written to.
So, not a problem, with the huge advantage FAT can be implemented/validated/etc in a few dozen lines of code.
KISS
So I'd rather use EXT3 or NTFS because of Journaling, and not FAT.
UUIDs do not have any endianness. They are just a sequence of individual bytes.
It's true that some ways of generating UUIDs work by using the bytes of longer numbers, which I can believe use mixed endianness (I don't know them well enough to remember myself). But no one should be relying on that when reading UUIDs back out, except maybe for debugging purposes.
Or does GPT require interpreting the parts of UUIDs? If so, that is the real problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...
With the one that's more common ("Variant 1"), I'd say that I *slightly* disagree that representing the byte sequence 99,aa,bb,cc as 99aabbcc is "big endian". If you don't philosphically think of the latter as a number, then it's just the bytes written out compactly. But I do see that if you think of it as a number then it's big endian, especially if you're distinguishing from variant 2.
But UEFI is more sane. Bios systems map the first 512 bytes which are both code and partition table into ram. Into that you need to cram enough code to locate stage 2, which I think tended to be located in the alignment space between the MBR and the next sector. Stage 2 once loaded needed enough logic to find and load your boot partition, and load your config from it, parse the kernel list and finally load one of those kernels. I seem to remember grub hard coding where the stage2 actually was, although I might be wrong about that. Either way it was a kinda fragile mess.
Sure, every boot process needs to get enough logic loaded to do the next thing, but with efi this is all taken care of during efis various internal loading phases, nicely located in code on onboard flash where it probably should be. By the time it comes to look for what you want to load, you are already in long mode and we aren't hiding stuff in places not covered by a partition definition. It is kinda annoying they didn't consider a boot filesystem with large enough file storage for big images (exfat, udfs, other reasonable choice, we have the filesystems) but we can cope with that.
The process for detecting bootable partitions and updating boot entries is a lot, lot saner than BIOS systems tend to be. Sure there are details of the design I don't like, and I kinda agree with your points there too, but substitute those for better choices and you still have a reasonable overall framework.
Ok contrast that with UEFI. There are FAT boot partitions and PE executables and what not. That's a lot more complexity.
Of course, pretty much all EFI implementations only support FAT, so it's a bit of a moot point; the only one I'm aware of that supports anything else is the one on Intel Macs, which also understands HFS+.
You can find a huge selection of EFI filesystem drivers at https://efi.akeo.ie/ but they're derived from GRUB and hence GPL, so don't expect the likes of American Megatrends to be bundling these any time soon.
So, just do FAT and be done with it. Adding other filesystems is just a waste of time because the ESP only needs to store a half dozen files or so.
13.3.1.1: "The EFI firmware must support the FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 variants of the EFI file system"
The main problem you have is that convincing manufacturers and proprietary OS makers (including Microsoft) to switch to a hypothetical UEFI replacement free of those issues is going to be an impossible task, while UEFI is already here and while not perfect appears to be better than the legacy BIOS boot system.
No. They are not Windows executables. They won’t run under Windows at all for multiple reasons. They are PE executables.
PE is the executable format developed for Windows, and yes, it is backwards compatible with MZ executables, so it has the now-confusing MZ header even though that doesn’t make sense under EFI. It also has some other weird details kind of hardcoded in, like some of the data directories, many of which don’t make that much sense under EFI. Worse, it’s a little weird to parse, with many things being deduced by using known structure sizes combined with offsets specified in fields.
However, PE as a format is totally fine. Good, even. In its purest form, it really doesn’t have that much baggage. It flat out has some advantages over ELF whose symbol table non-sense is notoriously complicated. Not so under PE: explicit table of exports, explicit table of imports. The imports go to specific modules. Symbols don’t conflict. It’s got cruft, but it’s very simple to write a parser or loader, and I’ve done so a number of times before. With PE the runtime linking is handled by whatever OS is running, be it EFI or Windows; none of the INTERP stuff is needed.
Frankly, I’d be OK with using PE on Linux too. When I was a kid, I toyed around with making a binfmt for PE. Of course I didn’t finish (most notably, I never figured out how to do linking, since the ELF binfmt didn’t really do that) but it’s quite straightforward to get the actual loader going.
As for the rest of the grievances… As far as I know, FAT and GPT are only required to be supported by EFI, not required to be used. Some EFI implementations support other filesystems for the ESP (like Apple with HFS+,) and I’ve not used one that won’t happily use an ESP on an MBR.
Starting with the fact they have a dedicated set of "subsystem" values: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-form... - the win32 loader won't load anything that isn't the CUI or the GUI Windows one, although the kernel also knows about the native one. You'll just get the "this is not a Windows application" messagebox.
With NASM, you can also override that linker stub. For example save this to a file:
org 100h
start:
mov dx, msg
mov ah, 9
int 21h
mov ah, 4Ch
int 21h
msg db 'Are you still running DOS in 2022? Wow! 640K enough for you!',13,10,'$'
then if you are using Microsoft's tools you can use LINK.EXE <usual args> /STUB:stub.com and voila, if anyone _happens_ to (try to) your code under DOS, they'll get an amusing message.
If you want it to take up minimum space, use this one:
org 100h
start:
mov ah,4Ch
int 21h
Apparently the header is hardcoded in mingw, but you could easily binary patch it in the resulting executable.
I think I read somewhere you can also remove the stub completely, but I've never tried it.
Edit: for my last comment, yes, you can definitely drop it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9659538.
The mixed-endianness of GUIDs sounds annoying, but also easily worked around. It seems worth putting up with for the resiliency offered having the GPT duplicated at the beginning and and end of the disk.
I'm not sure the UEFI system partition has any practical need for anything newer or more complex than FAT. It is a very simple file system for which support is ubiquitous, and is far more capable than an MBR boot sector.
The EFI executable format being derived from Microsoft does not seem like an inherent problem, unless you can point out some meaning limitation it has compared to an alternative. However I do not know enough about binary executable formats to debate the merits of PE over ELF, so I could be missing something.
It seems to me the benefits of UEFI far outweigh the negatives here. And with UEFI now being ubiquitous in consumer and commercial hardware for about a decade now, I do not think a bleeding edge distro like Fedora dropping BIOS/MBR is a huge deal.
I've always wondered why it was required that my EFI partition be FAT. I've had systems where that partition has gotten messed up and required an fsck from a recovery boot, and it seemed like it should be possible to either do that automatically in some way, but being able to use a filesystem that self-corrects would be nice too (although maybe overkill for the 1 GB or whatever I give it). I guess maybe it would only be possible to perform the fsck if I booted from a different partition, which then could develop the same issue. This does make me wonder how silly it would be to have a duplicate boot partition on each of my machines that I only mount to sync over changes to the real one so I could avoid needing to grab my flash drive when stuff like this happens...
I was on the Fedora technical committee in the past, and if I were still there I feel like I wouldn't go for this now. But I've also been very marginally involved in Fedora in recent years, and I don't think I have a good sense of what the tradeoffs are here. There are legitimate points where it's reasonable to say goodbye to the past, and maybe this is one of them.
But a 10 year old computer is perfectly capable of running even the latest version of the heavy-est DEs.
Also, "working UEFI supports" means working enough to boot Windows and not much else. Kernel bugzilla still has lots of UEFI bugs open for early UEFI firmware, and even not-so-early UEFI firmware (cough efi=no_disable_early_pci_dma ).
This is easy for IBM/Fedora to forget because GPUs probably don't matter much to them. They just take their intel integrated graphics on their workstation (or server) and go. And other linux devs are probably rich enough to buy a modern GPU.
But it is a huge issue and it'll not have become irrelevant for at least another decade. Not being able to boot MBR will break (and prevent) much more than the Fedora, LWN, or most of the threads here are aware of.
Nope. I think there must be a miscommunication here so I'll be more explicit.
If you have CSM/BIOS mode on your UEFI default motherboard and you set it to CMB/BIOS mode of course you can run BIOS based video cards.
But if you switch your mobo to UEFI boot (say, because you want to run future Fedora, or maybe boot off an nvme storage device) you can't use your BIOS firmware video cards (unless, like some gigabyte cards they shipped for a few years with both BIOS firmware and UEFI firmware). It has nothing to do with secureboot or signing or any of that. GPU's are intimitely involved (INT_10h in BIOS and something cursed in UEFI GOP) in the first few operations on boot in both systems and the firmware on the GPU has to be able to fulfill that role.
So Fedora removing BIOS boot effectively removes the ability to use most video cards ever made. Anything designed before 2015 has a decent chance of causing trouble.
Actually you can, you just don't get firmware boot support. Plenty of those boards work just fine in linux/etc because they reprogram the entire board using AtomBios/etc when the ati/nouveau/etc drivers load. The Arm/PPC/riscv people are all running the same PCIe boards as everyone else, and outside of a few cases they are doing just fine not running the x86 option roms.
Do you remember this?
That is AFAIK not true for industrial boards. For example current PC Engines APU2 boards just have Coreboot-based BIOS without UEFI.
I cannot believe BIOS boot support is even close to the amount of code required for UEFI boot.
Before you say "UEFI is much older than 10 years old", please remember that UEFI only started being a default ever since Windows 8 (10 years old). Windows 7 can't even boot on UEFI (it requires BIOS emulation to be active). I have a system from 7 years ago that while it claims to have an UEFI BIOS, it is so full bugs it is unusable except to boot Windows. I mean, critical bugs, as in, you boot Linux with UEFI just once, you risk the UEFI var storage getting corrupted and the motherboard becoming a paperweight.
Also, why are you so focused with corporate decision of a distro that is obviously cattered for future devices?
This hardware is not just usable, it is _perfectly usable_, up to the point you'd barely distinguish it Gnome-performance-wise from something from last year if you pair with an SSD (which is not so strange).
This is not a 486 with 4megs of RAM that requires a special DE. These are machines with many gigs of RAM that have graphic cards which are still better than some of today's low-end cards. If any change like this is ever accepted, drawing the support line at "10 year old hardware", it's going to be hard to ever again claim that Linux is good for the environment.
If someone is heavily invested into RH for their BIOS only infra, this could be an issue for them. I'm sure there's large operations that would need fixing up if these change happens.
Not that RH is obligated to cater fully to that crowed of course. But 10 years is a bit silly, especially with how expensive hardware is now due to covid.
All that said, it's not going to be an issue like everyone is making it out to be.
Individuals should have few problems forking mainline to keep BIOS support, and large organizations will be given amble time to upgrade (at least years. RH isn't stupid with it's corporate customers.)
With Stream it's open to not just bugfixes but community-contributed enhancements.
also it takes about same amount of code to boot BIOS and UEFI
Of course? Fedora Linux is an asset of the company Red Hat, their prevailing revenue model seems to have something to do with adding their own brand of complexity to otherwise simple open source systems, see systemd.
Since its acquisition by IBM (NYSE:IBM), Red Hat has entered the conglomerate of publicly owned companies, their profits are linked together with other public hardware manufacturers like Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), through intraday traders and index funds.
In summary, removing support for older hardware increases sale of new hardware, hardware and software companies coordinate profit sharing through stock markets. Pretty simple.
I think it matters quite a lot that the distro in question is Fedora which is by design forward looking and kind of a testbed. They have been shipping Wayland as a default since 2016 when it still had countless of hardware and software problems. Part of the diversity of the linux ecosystem is that distros can be opinionated.
This shift to wayland has been one of the most user hostile decisions I've seen. Every distro that defaults to wayland pushes me that much closer to simply running linux in a WSL container on windows.
I don't know about video players crashing either.
When talking about a fast moving new piece of technology, it's good to give it a try once in a while and not let your 4 year old experience colour your judgement.
take a look at https://arewewaylandyet.com/ to find some alternative app for your X-only software
Also make sure to alias vlc to your new alternative, i keep forgetting i don’t have vlc installed anymore...
You wouldn't have a nice Wayland experience on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for example.
That's a bingo! :^(
Looking to move to an arch flavor, but need to figure out how to backup ~ 500GB of stuff I don't want to lose.
Switching to gnome on xorg, it's rock solid stable.
I will wait to switch back to wayland when I'm forced to a few years down the line. I'm done bleeding on the edge.
As someone already pointed out, VLC doesn't support wayland natively, so it's running under Xwayland. Ironically the issue could very well be X related.
I'm not a UEFI huge fan (I've use boot-repair a lot of times since its creation), but I can see why maintaining a legacy bootloader could be distracting.
That said, while there are loads of systems out there that could still use BIOS, I like to look at the second hand market.
There are a lot of Dell R710s for sale on eBay still (700+ listings). These are commonly suggested as a good "intro to homelabbing" server in a variety of places. These systems were released in 2009, often featuring CPUs from 2007-2008. They support UEFI 2.1.
Contrasting this, some UEFI implementations are horrifically buggy and largely seem designed to only work with Windows.
I think 10 years is probably too close a cutoff but I do think that eventually it becomes a lot more work to maintain it (like i386 builds, x32 builds, etc.) and becomes not worth it except for niche distros.
If we factor in things like environmental impact, it makes a great deal more sense to continue to support older systems for some longer period of time.
UEFI specifications are like Web specifications: they're good to wipe your ass with, but on the Web when the rubber meets the road, the only "standard" that matters is "does it work in Chrome" (in the past, IE). Similarly the only standard that a UEFI implementation need comply with is "does it boot Windows".
I have lots of UEFI hardware with never-to-be-fixed bugs that are mitigated by just using BIOS boot. These are from Dell and Supermicro.
The Dells when set for UEFI would boot 50% of the time and 100% of the time in BIOS mode. The workaround was well known and is the only reasonable thing to do. It's EOL from dell it will never be patched.
The Supermicro's would work great in UEFI but the factory default was BIOS boot. The trouble is that these particular systems had a reasonably high chance of loosing BIOS setup data if they took a power hit (APC UPS are complete garbage FWIW). We'd have to send someone to a remote location to switch it back to UEFI or just reinstall in BIOS mode. By default they would remarkably turn back on when the power was restored and would recover fine if they could boot.
This stuff isn't useless or even THAT old. It's just unreliable in UEFI mode. While most newer stuff from these brands have more reliable UEFI, we're going to keep using hardware that is good enough. We work around hardware/firmware problems because there's nothing out there that doesn't have quirks. "Old" hardware has known quirks that have workarounds that have already been "paid for" with expended labor. New hardware has new quirks that you have to pay off.
Of course it's all moot for this discussion as we don't use rolling quirk factories like Fedora.
Unless you have the higher end H710 raid controller or whatever else, Red Hat rendered this chassis controller inoperable with their custom in-house kernel patching process.
For people with legacy-only firmware systems, you too can run UEFI on lazy cloud providers and legacy hardware. I do this on my 14 year old dell laptop just so that all my x86_64 systems have the same boot efistub linux kernel images. All you need is to use one of the EDK DUET bootloader builds such as BootDuet¹, or for an easier user experience CloverBootloader². Only complaint is secureboot emulation can be a pain. But I imagine with Windows 11 around the corner requiring TPMs (which might require emulation on older hardware that doesn't have it) and secureboot, UEFI firmware emulators with these feature will probably get more popular and more accessible.
Unfortunately, there's no appetite - there's no point since that in a significant break Windows 11 only runs on new processors that happens to have both UEFI and TPM (not always enabled by default but it's there).
¹ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ways-to-install-...
https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibmtpm20tss/
In my Windows 10 setup, Bitlocker refuses to boot without a recovery key when I don't use GRUB to load Windows; presumably, Windows recorded the system state when I enabled Bitlocker, which was booted via Grub. In similar fashion I expect Windows 11 to actually work just fine on systems with a TPM as long as Grub is used every time.
What is this ever-present BS about "rot"!? Why do people think continual changes are even needed? Code should become more stable over time, an ideal that I wish much more software would follow. The way BIOS boot works has basically remained unchanged ever since the first IBM PC, and it's incredibly simple. Linus Torvald's opinion of EFI is worth reading:
https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html
7C00h forever! ;-)
- Firmware understands some sort of minimal filesystem and how to talk to a device containing it.
- Firmware has a configuration store that holds a few variables and a device tree.
- Firmware has the ability to load binary images into RAM from the minimal filesystem above.
- On boot, configuration is checked, the kernel and initrd are binary-loaded into RAM, and the firmware jumps to the kernel with a pointer to the commandline, initrd, and device tree.
U-Boot more or less does this and it's beautiful. The bootloader loads your OS and then gets out of the way. No multistage crap or overengineered firmware interfaces.
- Eliminating variable code from the boot process makes it more secure and reliable. Why do I need to load a separate loader to load my OS which is overwriteable by my OS if the firmware can do it in a standard, fixed way?
- At least have some mechanism to load an arbitrary number of sectors.
Remember how some people have had issues with windows destroying booting of linux that is due to MBR being a useless piece of antiquated software and breaking. It wasnt windows's fault its just that its update utility had to overwrite a part of MBR and since MBR was already basically a house of cards all you had to do to break it is have a little mishap and your linux boot is gone (it was same on other side just less people were crying about it because well they blamed windows for breaking itself)
Granted, I don't use Fedora so this doesn't directly affect me yet, but the Linux community has a history of too-early adoption of ideas started at Fedora (systemd, pulseaudio) that take years to reach production-ready status, if ever. At some point those of us who still use legacy hardware at home/work will be forced to either throw out perfectly good machines, or switch to a holdout distro like Slackware or Void (not that there's anything wrong with either of those) and lose valuable time moving our workflow. We'll also be at the mercy of our hosting providers as they decide whether to overhaul their entire hosting backend, or else drop Fedora and any other distro that follows their lead.
I get that UEFI is the future of bootstrapping, but it's too early to pull the plug on BIOS.
Red hat flatlined when it was acquired by IBM, a consequence of a free as in free beer model to software.
Boot from the install media in rescue mode, chroot into /mnt/sysimage, then grub2-install onto /dev/sda.
I've never had to do this outside of the redhat realm, but the procedure is not complex after a few rounds to commit it to memory.
Remember how some people have had issues with windows destroying booting of linux
The MBR is tiny (you could even write out all the entries on paper as a backup, like I became accustomed to many years ago whenever I partitioned a disk) --- and restoring it is also equally straightforward. I don't even know where to begin with troublshooting EFI's horribly overengineered boot entries and NVRAM variables...
That's neither here nor there. You can still perform BIOS boots from a GPT-partitioned disk, in fact it works even better: while in MBR mode the stage1 grub loader must be placed in the unused 31kB between the partition table and the first partition start, GPT allows you to explicitly allocate a partition for the stage1 code. This means no more borkage because Windows overwrote an officially unused part of the disk, and the stage1 payload is no longer limited to 31kB.
Point being, your rant has nothing to do with BIOS vs UEFI boot.
Agreed.
> It wasnt windows's fault its just that its update utility had to overwrite a part of MBR
It was a reasonable assumption that whatever drive Windows' was installed on already had a working bootloader installed, otherwise it wouldn't have been able to boot itself to do Windows Update. Windows did NOT have to override it.
This was not MBR fault. AFAIK Linux did NOT do the same thing as overriding, which is why it has separate `grub2-install` and `update-grub` commands. Once installed to a drive, `update-grub` will only change the simple config file it reads at boot. Perhaps both of them did override themselves when a bugfix or new feature was available, but I don't think Windows's bootloader changed much after any OS release.
Now, GPT/UEFI is a million times better in that aspect because it can allow easily multiple different bootloaders that don't have to know of each other's existence. But I blame Windows in MBR case very much.
Also, some though not all motherboards allow you booting from BOTH old-school MBR and newer GPT so you may not need to disable CSM and still eat your GPT cake. This may be useful if you e.g. have an old MBR drive with Linux and another GPT one with Windows.
Its like selinux hardware edition.
This isn't a thing on the stock kernel.
And if Microsoft stops signing your bootloaders it is an automatic death sentence for your distribution, as you can no longer boot the LiveCD without "scary prompts" and/or fiddling with the BIOS setup.
Not really?
Several popular Linux distributions simply do not support Secure Boot. Arch Linux is one of them.
There are however going to be a lot more issues self-enrolling keys going forward.
For dual booting you'd need to load both sets of keys (your own and Microsoft's) or configure your primary bootloader to trust Microsoft's signature and chainload.
There's nothing inherently Microsoft related about secure boot, except for that on some Microsoft devices where the ability to use your own keys has been taken away from you. Don't buy a Microsoft Surface without checking its Linux limitations, basically, but that's a Microsoft problem, not a secure boot problem.
If you don't like being restricted, just turn off secure boot. Or turn off any verification that happens after secure boot; it's the Linux kernel that's enforcing drivers it loads to be signed, not the secure boot standard. Patch out the verification routine with a return true if you have to.
Everything will boot and load, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your requirements.
Microsoft is the root of trust for ~100% of OEM secure boot implementations.
Theoretically, you can implement Secure Boot with an alternative root of trust... but you'd have to get the OEMs on board... to the tune of many millions of dollars. Per OEM.
The only alternative is to get users to install their own keys, which is fiddly and technical.
Therefore, for all intents and purposes, Linux on the desktop is only a thing at all because Microsoft deigns to allow it for the time being.
It's a bit worse than that actually; it's actively scary and dangerous, as with much EFI stuff. Quoting the Arch Wiki:
> Warning: Replacing the platform keys with your own can end up bricking hardware on some machines, including laptops, making it impossible to get into the UEFI/BIOS settings to rectify the situation. This is due to the fact that some device (e.g GPU) firmware (OpROMs), that get executed during boot, are signed using Microsoft's key.
The key process creation itself is extremely manual and finicky, and probably prone to error.
The process of enrolling your platform key involves deleting all enrolled certificates. Let's hope your hardware provider implemented this properly so you didn't just brick your system.
> Once Secure Boot is in "User Mode" keys can only be updated by signing the update (using sign-efi-sig-list) with a higher level key. Platform key can be signed by itself.
So any loss of your platform key (e.g. by cosmic ray flipped bit, or hard drive failure, or simply user error) results in effectively bricking your hardware, right? (Unless and until you can rewrite the firmware with a hardware device.)
I'm sure some folks have worked out a good process for managing all this, but it feels so flaky to me and I don't have a good handle on what is required to do this right. Back in the day, installing Linux for me used to involve 2-3 cycles of screwing up something with GRUB, having to boot into the LiveCD, and fixing things. Right now it feels like one screw up could be fatal to hundreds of dollars of hardware. That's before you get to the issue of having to mess with the EFI variables, which has resulting in bricking hardware in the past: https://www.theregister.com/2016/02/02/delete_efivars_linux/
Again, some of the above could be based on my misunderstandings, but that's kind of the point as well - the scary thing about secure boot / UEFI for Linux users is that it's a new area of required knowledge that you seemingly need to be 100% right about or risk burning hardware.
There are too many downside at this point in time.
But then, these are common linux components, not specific to fedora. They are old and battle tested by now, do they really require significant resources to maintain beyond running some automated tests?
Especially because of:
> Fedora is also installed on cloud servers and virtual machines of various sorts, some of which do not support anything other than booting via BIOS. The proposal noted that the time of the 2020 discussion, Amazon's AWS did not support UEFI, but that has changed. Marc Pervaz Boocha pointed out that many virtual private server (VPS) providers do not support UEFI, giving Linode and Vultr as examples. Dominik "Rathann" Mierzejewski reported that OVH is also affected
(or just running virtualized stuff locally)
libvirt/kvm supports it, Hyper-V supports it, Virtualbox supports it, ESXi supports it.
I recall reading somewhere that using UEFI on qemu/kvm caused problems with snapshotting and/or migration; is that still the case?
That bug appears to be a duplicate, I use legacy bios type for all my VMs to get around this since it's been a problem for at least 5 or more years.
Even if I dislike the UEFI specification and existing implementations, the spec is more than 24 years old. It might fulfill its purpose as a bootloader/OS interface.
The UEFI BDS interface, the one the most people see and the operating system interfaces, is now standardized for many operating systems and OEMs, making it easier to integrate and maintain. It is finally possible to use standard security mechanisms (verified, measured boot) to secure your device. So we can use such technologies to ensure device security reasonably as we do in my corp www.immu.ne
The custom certificate provisioning is a mess and hard to use, but that can be possibly made easy by projects like: https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl
I don't believe the UEFI interface is beneficial for data-center or embedded devices. The UEFI BDS interface was developed for client platforms and required physical presence. It leads to complexity in the DC and embedded world. I feel a more suitable approach would be www.linuxboot.org which is already used by many Hyperscalers and Embedded companies.
That's my 50 cents about the story. My background, I am coreboot developer and security architect.
1. Getting audio to behave.
2. Boot problems. (waves at LILO)
I don't know enough details about how UEFI and BIOS and MBR and GRUB and all of this works -- which probably contributed to my difficulties. But the problems certainly didn't end when I left LILO behind.
So it always makes me wonder: Have the people responsible for the bootloaders ever used a Mac? My goodness it could not be simpler. Hold the right key combo at boot time and you get a nice interface that shows you all the bootable devices you've got plugged in. USB, SATA, NVMe, whatever, it's there. And when you select one and boot, it actually works.
Recognizing that we don't actually need a GUI for this, and the challenge is different because Apple gets to use firmware and only worries about one type of OS, what would it take to make a PC bootloader work just as nicely?
And a very, very narrow set of potential hardware compared to the entire PC ecosystem.
If we take Apple's bootloader as a base line:
Drop GPU support, except for blessed models, from initial boot support.
Remove RAM customization options. Can't change speed and timings. Can't support ECC. Might as well disallow customizing RAM alltogether and solder it to the board or in the SOC.
Remove CPU customization options. Can't change speed, enable or disable supported features. Can't chage ACPI tables.
Remove storage customization options. Can't change storage speed, protocol support. Can't even add or remove internal storage devices at all, if we go by the latest trend.
Implement a bluetooth stack onto the bootloader firmware, because that's for sure safe and could never go wrong. Force OSes to write their pairing keys in the firmware storage.
Implement a wifi stack onto the bootloader firmware, because that's for sure safe and could never go wrong. Force OSes to write their pairing keys in the firmware storage.
Implement internet-based, network boot support from a centralized, blessed location. Because that's completly safe and could never go wrong.
is at odds with:
> let me select which disk partition to boot from
As soon as there's any UI at all, one has to deal with much of the complexity of modern UI. For one thing, I'm sure modern firmware has to support modern HID input devices, such as USB keyboards. But also, ideally, that UI should be accessible to people who can't use a minimal screen-and-keyboard UI implementation, such as blind people. This is an area where, even with UEFI, PCs fall short. I like the way Apple has resolved this on its Apple Silicon Macs [1]. As I understand it, as soon as the Mac has to display any UI at boot time, it boots into a minimal version of macOS itself, where VoiceOver and any other accessibility tool can run.
I agree, though, that in the common case where the default OS is booted, the path from power-on to OS kernel should be as short as practical. Booting into a BIOS in 8086 emulation mode hardly seems like the best way to do this. But then, a design-by-committee solution like UEFI might not be optimal either. It pains me somewhat to say this, but Apple's proprietary, vertically integrated solution might be near optimal.
[1]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...
20 of the poster's last 30 submissions have been LWN subscriber links.
From your link:
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Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared."
Fedora is only one, relatively fast moving distro, which gives you their software for free, and which didn't even make this decision, but who could blame them if they did, in their position?
I bought my computer about 15 years ago, with what at the time was a pretty beefy setup. I still use it for my everyday work because, as it turns out, you don't need much more than 4Gb of RAM to surf the internet.
Due to buggy UEFI support, I cannot reinstall Windows 10 on that PC. If Linux stopped supporting Bios, I'd have to throw it away. But more importantly, this computer has better performance than the computers of many of my relatives in South America.
I wish every developer in the first world had to explain at least once to their nieces that no, Roblox will not work on their Chinese Android tablet with 1Gb of RAM.
Old hardware is great. Expecting people to support it forever for free is folly. This is exactly why people pay IBM/RedHat for support.
Burnt EEPROM still remains the ultimate security.
But is it actually tested against or only can be?
Not looking forward to having to deal with this one.
Note that Google Chrome which is the web browser with the highest adoption rate requires a CPU with SSE3 support which was introduced in 2004.
Which platform older than a Core 2 can even run the latest operating systems? The very latest Pentium 4 range (2004-2006)? So we would just be dropping support for them? That’s OK.
NetBSD supports i386, Alpha, Amiga, 32-bit Sparc, 32-bit MIPS, ARMv6, StrongARM, sun2, sun3...
LinuxMint still supports i686.
Debian supports i386, i686, armel, armhf, s390, and MIPS.
Slackware supports i586 and s390.
Kali supports i686.
Void Linux supports i686, ARMv6, ARV7.
FreeBSD supports arm, armel, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, sparc64, pc98, powerpc, powerpc64, ps3, xbox.
Alpine supports i486, ppc64le, s390x, armhf.
Devuan supports i686.
Gentoo supports i486, i586, i686, alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, mips, powerpc, ppc64, sparc64.
Which of these don't have recent releases?
Even those platforms that claim to build for i686, I’m not sure if everything works correctly on pre-SSE2 (Pentium Pro, Pentium III, older Pentium 4) CPUs. And I don’t think any of the Linux distributions will actually run on a i386, i486 or i586 as i686 is almost required to have multithreading without busy waits.
The BSDs I don’t know about, but it’s a fair number of distributions that seem to support older x86 CPUs you posted. I didn’t know there would be so many. I couldn’t find Linux Mint though.
[1]: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1087434.html?sid=4b682... [2]: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...