Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/891273/ea9c5e88260a64e9/

by bitcharmer • 4 years ago

176 212 4 years ago

Yeah it seems like a bad idea

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)

martijnvds• 4 years ago

It's easy to use EFI when virtualizing things locally.

libvirt/kvm supports it, Hyper-V supports it, Virtualbox supports it, ESXi supports it.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

But change a working virtualized system from BIOS to EFI and there is a good chance a bunch of other things will break. Lots of memory mappings and hardware detection stuff changes if you switch from BIOS to EFI, together with the likely need to repartition or add a virtual disk for the EFI boot partition.

AshamedCaptain9• 4 years ago

As far as I can see, only Hyper-V enables it by default as of today; this means most of the VMs being created _right now_ we can assume to be BIOS rather than UEFI.

cesarb• 4 years ago

libvirt/kvm supports it,

I recall reading somewhere that using UEFI on qemu/kvm caused problems with snapshotting and/or migration; is that still the case?

ridgered4• 4 years ago

libvirt/kvm sort of supports it, unless you want to use snapshots I guess. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1881850

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.

Nux• 4 years ago

The idea was turned down, luckily.

There are too many downside at this point in time.

blueflow7• 4 years ago

UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique.

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.

emteycz• 4 years ago

I don't see why Linux users would care about this. It boots the system, nobody cares it uses some old MS tech.

blueflow7• 4 years ago

Because "removing legacy" was one of the key arguments of EFI enthusiasts, and its still plenus bovis stercus.

tremon7• 4 years ago

It doesn't just "boot the system". The full EFI specification includes support for runtime services, i.e. proprietary code that keeps running even after your FLOSS operating system has booted. That's something Linux users should care about: it provides a backdoor for clinging to closed-source drivers on a pretend-open platform. There's already been proof-of-concept EFI viruses, it's only a matter of time until the first antivirus EFI service appears.

Schopenhauer01• 4 years ago

Less legacy code for them to maintain. I see that as a win.

adrian_b7• 4 years ago

Fedora does not maintain any code related to legacy BIOS booting.

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.

faho5• 4 years ago

EFI is here, non-specialty Linux distros don't really have the option of not adopting it.

So the choice is between adopting it and keeping BIOS indefinitely, or adopting it and at some point in the future dropping BIOS.

blueflow7• 4 years ago

False dichotomy: Not picking EFI does not mean keeping BIOS indefinitely.

chasil3• 4 years ago

Intel ME is also here, and newer systems absolutely do not have the option to disable it, despite all it's flaws.

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.

jaclaz• 4 years ago

Only for the record, I don't know in Linux, but on windows (at least up to 10) it is perfectly possible to use MBR partitioned media to boot in UEFI (i.e. even if generally speaking GPT is "tied" to UEFI, GPT partitioning is not a requisite unless a greater than 4TB mass storage with 512 bytes/sector is used, 4K disks are generally not bootable for a number of operating systems, but they are rare anyway as boot media).

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.

pja• 4 years ago

IIRC Windows 11 will no longer boot from MBR partitions & you have to convert them to GPT.

mjg599• 4 years ago

- previously, x86 MBR-style partition tables (which were the only thing really supported in Linux) gave you no strong semantic information about what a partition was[1]. GPT may involve GUIDs, but in the grand scheme of things that's a small part of the cost of mounting stuff.

- 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

qwerty4561273• 4 years ago

what features do you want in the partition that contains your bootloader that FAT doesn't support?

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.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

previously, x86 MBR-style partition tables (which were the only thing really supported in Linux) gave you no strong semantic information about what a partition was[1]

LVM appears to solve this issue as well as the related issue of only supporting a limited number of partitions in BIOS.

dinosaurdynasty• 4 years ago

what features do you want in the partition that contains your bootloader that FAT doesn't support?

Atomic updates and not getting corrupted if the power is pulled/lost while the filesystem is being written to.

Dwedit• 4 years ago

FAT filesystems tend to get the cluster chains corrupted, then all your files are suddenly truncated to exactly 1 cluster long.

So I'd rather use EXT3 or NTFS because of Journaling, and not FAT.

quietbritishjim2• 4 years ago

UUIDs ... endianess is not little, big - its mixed. mixed in the same value

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.

blueflow7• 4 years ago

Its relevant for converting them from and to their string representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...

GoblinSlayer2• 4 years ago

UUID is defined as a sequence of 6 integer fields of various sizes. Their conversion to text is fairly straightforward, but serialization to bytes may vary depending on how you do it. "Whatever ends up in memory" is microsoft little endian format.

op00to• 4 years ago

You don’t like it because Microsoft has a hand in developing the standard?

zahllos2• 4 years ago

I am actually for keeping the legacy scheme around for a good while, mostly because there's plenty of hardware even now that relies on it.

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.

im3w1l• 4 years ago

What I like about bios is how simple stupid it is. It reads a bunch of bytes in and boom and starts running them. Partition tables and multiple stages, yes that is the convention but you dont have to adhere to that if you dont want to. Having to change into long mode, yes that is an important wrinkle I give you that. But either way, the design is so simple that you could write a little hello world mbr-program with a hex editor. It's a handful of bytes.

Ok contrast that with UEFI. There are FAT boot partitions and PE executables and what not. That's a lot more complexity.

jordemort• 4 years ago

EFI doesn't actually mandate FAT for the system partition. The system partition can be any filesystem that the firmware supports.

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.

StillBored8• 4 years ago

Well splitting hairs, it mandates that everyone support FAT, individual system+OS vendors can add their own filesystems, but then its vendor lock.

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"

Nextgrid2• 4 years ago

The legacy BIOS boot system and MBR format has some real issues that could be improved but this just sounds like an ideological battle against things inspired by Microsoft rather than legitimate technical concerns. As far as I know, despite the things you list having Microsoft roots, they are well-documented and have free/libre implementations so Microsoft influences are not really a problem.

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.

jchw• 4 years ago

- 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.

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.

zahllos2• 4 years ago

No. They are not Windows executables. They won’t run under Windows at all for multiple reasons. They are PE executables.

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,'$'

nasm -fbin -o stub.com stub.asm

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

which will just exit that program if run under dos.

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.

babypuncher3• 4 years ago

Most of the issues you describe sound either trivial or non-issues entirely.

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.

saghm• 4 years ago

- 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.

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...

cpach• 4 years ago

I’m not sure I like that idea. Some older PCs have a very buggy and crappy UEFI implementation. Using UEFI on those can be a nightmare. And upgrading the firmware might not be possible, or only possible via Windows. (Thinkcentre M72e, I’m looking in your direction.)

ulzeraj• 4 years ago

Nothing against EFI but secure boot as it is is a pain in the ass. Want to install some kernel module to enjoy your Xbox controller? Too bad you need to follow this convoluted guide about generating and installing certificates to sign your driver... or just disable the whole secure boot thingie.

Its like selinux hardware edition.

Foxboron4• 4 years ago

This is a misnormer though. Secure Boot and kernel modules are not inherently dependent on each other. However modern Linux distribution carry out-of-tree patches which throws the Secure Boot keys into the Linux platform keyring and enforce lockdown mode.

This isn't a thing on the stock kernel.

AshamedCaptain9• 4 years ago

They also do this because it is likely that Microsoft will stop signing their bootloaders/kernels with their UEFI CA keys if they allow arbitrary user modules to be loaded (because it would be trivial to abuse those kernels to break Windows' full disk encryption).

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.

cabirum• 4 years ago

I can see grub2, syslinux, and anaconda are affected in the proposal. (Syslinux removed, others simplified).

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?

turminal• 4 years ago

Fedora is often the first distro to adopt radical changes like this and then all the other distros follow and then everyone has to live with their decisions, which often turn out to be made too soon.

Not looking forward to having to deal with this one.

johnny22• 4 years ago

it's not really happening, or at least not yet. I don't see why this even got posted the way it was.

AshamedCaptain9• 4 years ago

Oh god. So after Windows drops support basically for any PC that is 4 years old, a Linux distribution entertains the idea to follow closely and drop support for any PC that is 10 years old? Is this corporate influence?

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.

8K832d7tNmiQ• 4 years ago

Look, even if RHEL 10 gonna drop UEFI support maybe sometime in the future, there's gonna be some retro enthusiats who would happily fork it with BIOS support returned.

Also, why are you so focused with corporate decision of a distro that is obviously cattered for future devices?

AshamedCaptain9• 4 years ago

"10 year old hardware" is retro ? Ivy Bridge is retro these days?

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.

anothernewdude2• 4 years ago

It's Red Hat, they dropped their support for community based linux. Why wouldn't they also drop support for old hardware.

dralley5• 4 years ago

That's not true... CentOS Stream is more of a "community" than CentOS was. If you had a bug in CentOS all you can do is file an issue in the Red Hat bug tracker and wait because there was no way to contribute.

With Stream it's open to not just bugfixes but community-contributed enhancements.

willis936• 4 years ago

Yes Fedora is "a distribution of linux". A distribution that is an upstream of an enterprise distribution. Why do you care if enterprise markets don't care about legacy support? Just use another distribution. That's one of the boons of linux.

bigpod3• 4 years ago

honestly at some point we should think about deprecating old code old stuff and i think 10 years might not be such a bad number, of course good deprecation policy would tell you for few releases before that something will get removed but its linux so even if they said we are removing BIOS support in fedora 40 everyone would cry

also it takes about same amount of code to boot BIOS and UEFI

TZubiri3• 4 years ago

"Is this corporate influence?"

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.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

a Linux distribution

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.

wing-_-nuts5• 4 years ago

Wayland! Ye gods. I tried. I really did. I understand that from a developer standpoint, it's the future. I understand from a security standpoint, it's more secure. From a user standpoint? It completely breaks so much functionality (copy / paste, screen share, blue light filters, etc). Video players crash and sometimes take down the whole OS with it. It puts so much responsibility that used to be the job of the x server off on the window managers.

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.

javchz• 4 years ago

Yes. I mean if it was centos / alma or debian, I would be scared we enter into an era of discarting perfectly capable hardware, but Fedora has always been packed "with the lastest but stable enough".

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.

nemetroid• 4 years ago

I understand the need to get around some of the quirks inherent in BIOS, but the idea of rich pre-OS applications just seems completely backwards. The goal for the early boot environment should be to hand off to the real operating system as soon as possible. Just let me select which disk partition to boot from and the operating system will take it from there, thanks.

bigpod3• 4 years ago

its all about UX, if you have an environment that has lots of menus and settings something even bios had to control certien aspects of your system like virtualization support and such you would like to have good UX, because of that UEFI was created. Now if you wanted to do that from OS you can but you need a technology many people hate and want to remove from their systems and hardware called Management Engine. Yes this is the purpose of ME allow changing of UEFI settings from either the OS of machine itself or changing of UEFI settings from another machine without requirement of IPMI(idrac iLo and simular implementations) and rebooting to get to it. Implementation of some sort of ME allows you to overclock your CPU from OS. So AMD has some sort of ME(of course its not called ME since that is just name of intel implementation) as well(how wide in functionality is another question) so do GPUs.

mwcampbell• 4 years ago

the idea of rich pre-OS applications just seems completely backwards.

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...

mjg599• 4 years ago

My short summary of this: pretty much every x86 client system since 2012 has shipped with working UEFI support (because Microsoft required it for new Windows 8 systems), and from a compatibility perspective Linux works Just Fine with basically all of them. Servers took a little longer (HP, especially, wanted to do things like just add GPT support to their BIOS implementation), but even that's in a good position now. The biggest concern I have is around cloud, where many providers still don't offer UEFI support.

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.

AshamedCaptain9• 4 years ago

Drawing the line at 10 years old is ... way too close for comfort. I could understand to drop i386 because it basically amounts to another entire architecture, and besides it seems with i386 you are also generally RAM limited which makes it harder to use a recent DE.

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 ).

Sharlin• 4 years ago

My current desktop's motherboard and CPU are from 2009. I have no idea if the MB supports UEFI; it definitely boots to BIOS by default. I've upgraded the storage, memory, and GPU, but there's been little cause to waste money on a new MB/CPU. But I guess I wouldn't install Fedora on this machine anyway, so shrug.

mjg599• 4 years ago

Eep! efi=no_disable_early_pci_dma only does anything if CONFIG_EFI_DISABLE_PCI_DMA is set, and distros should not be setting that by default (it's a thing that works Just Fine in theory, and specific implementations may fail hard with it - eg, if ExitBootServices() triggers a callback that assumes that a PCI device is able to DMA, things may explode). It's a useful security feature (I mean, I wrote it, I would say that) but it can break even if implementations follow the spec perfectly.

pabs33• 4 years ago

The majority of x86 computers I have are BIOS only, only one of them is UEFI and I only have it because I found it discarded on the side of the road. I don't use the UEFI mode though, since my current install doesn't support booting in UEFI mode (no GPT) and wouldn't support booting in BIOS mode if I switched it to GPT and UEFI.

superkuh2• 4 years ago

You (and they) forget the part where graphics cards play an intimate role in MBR or UEFI boot. And there still innumberable quite functional graphics cards that will never, ever, allow a system to boot under UEFI. GPUs are deeply integrated into the boot up process.

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.

tpush2• 4 years ago

What graphics cards make it unable to boot via UEFI?

jeffbee• 4 years ago

I have a UEFI system right here under my desk that provides legacy BIOS services for running option ROMs, video cards, SCSI host bus adapters, network adapters, anything. It even scans out their legacy video outputs in a little window. There's nothing incompatible between UEFI and legacy option ROMs. Perhaps you are thinking of Secure Boot.

userbinator4• 4 years ago

Linux works Just Fine with basically all of them.

Do you remember this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449

mjg599• 4 years ago

Yeah, turns out representing EFI variables as a filesystem was a mistake (sorry, that was my fault)

zajio1am• 4 years ago

My short summary of this: pretty much every x86 client system since 2012 has shipped with working UEFI support

That is AFAIK not true for industrial boards. For example current PC Engines APU2 boards just have Coreboot-based BIOS without UEFI.

iod3• 4 years ago

UEFI emulation is a thing.

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.

¹ https://github.com/migle/BootDuet

² https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader

zinekeller• 4 years ago

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).

iod3• 4 years ago

Apparently you can officially just shut off the restriction that forces Windows 11 to only run on new CPUs and the newest TPM by just setting a registry key AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU on install.¹ But I never use Windows and don't plan to start anytime soon, so it's not something that I will try.

¹ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ways-to-install-...

AshamedCaptain9• 4 years ago

I don't think you can emulate a TPM via software. You need a hook in the firmware and use SystemManagementMode/SMM, very likely.

pabs33• 4 years ago

Seems there are two such projects for that:

https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibmtpm20tss/

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

Windows 11 isn't going to work with emulated TPM stuff (unless you run Windows in a tiny Linux hypervisor will all PCIe space forwarded and an emulated virtual TPM, perhaps) but this approach should work perfectly fine for all other operating systems.

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.

Frenchgeek2• 4 years ago

Interesting... I'll check if it can emulate 64 bits UEFI on a 32 bits one (yet 64 bits cpu): Finding anything to boot on my old tablet PC is becoming a pain.

iod3• 4 years ago

GRUB does this relatively easily (without needing emulation) as I too have done it before on an old tablet. I am not sure what OS you are using but it should work fine for Linux and Windows although only the prior is easy and just works. On Debian and it's derivatives you just need the grub-efi-ia32 package, and then regular GRUB install process and 64bit loads fine without anything special.

guerrilla• 4 years ago

I understand why this stuff usually bothers people but I think this makes for Fedora specifically... they're popular and bleeding-edge, so they want to work on the latest popular hardware and not cater to minorities. If a hacker needs different, there's other distros and DIY, if a company needs different then they can just invest in maintenance of that themselves. Yeah, EFI sucks bad and we should be working to replace it with something that's free/open and actually good but this is the environment we're actually operate in and being in denial of that doesn't help anyone.

bigpod3• 4 years ago

while fedora defenetly is not my cup of tea, first thing i do when i get a new system(desktop or laptop) is disable legacy bios/CSM whatever it is labeled as. This is to prevent mirriad of issus BIOS brings including its horrible MBR. GPT is million times better and for someone who dual boots on many machines (and has a drive with 14 different operating systems as a test) to all you legacy BIOS and MBR fans MBR doesnt cut it and is cause of many headaches if you dual boot.

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)

morganvachon• 4 years ago

This is fine for you and your use case, but some of us (as pointed out in the article) are forced to stay with BIOS either due to owning legacy hardware that is still fully functional and even necessary, or because we use VMs and/or hosted services that require BIOS and don't support UEFI, or both. I'm one of those; I use a few legacy machines locally and I have VPS instances hosted with Vultr.

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.

TZubiri3• 4 years ago

At this point we should have learned the lesson from systemd, I think red hat now has a bad enough reputation that everything with their brand is an instant rejection, and any suggestion they throw is taken as a suggestion of what not to do.

Red hat flatlined when it was acquired by IBM, a consequence of a free as in free beer model to software.

TZubiri3• 4 years ago

This is the incorrect take on the subject. Dual booting is a feature used by less than one in ten thousand users. Obsoleting BIOS will obsolete millions of hardware pieces.

chasil3• 4 years ago

Recovering mbr boot corruption on CentOS is relatively easy.

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.

viraptor• 4 years ago

I agree in general, but not with this: "It wasnt windows's fault its just that its update utility had to overwrite a part of MBR". If they cared, they could spend some time to design / document a nice way for systems to redirect to the next entry. They could've used grub and chainload. They could've invited others to collaborate. It was very much in MS interest not to care and I totally blame them for doing just that.

userbinator4• 4 years ago

Ironically, the first thing I do is the opposite. BIOS boot has been simple and reliable for decades, and EFI remains a horrible mess.

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...

tremon7• 4 years ago

to all you legacy BIOS and MBR fans MBR doesnt cut it and is cause of many headaches if you dual boot.

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.

feikname• 4 years ago

GPT is million times better

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.

amir• 4 years ago

I wish people would stop sharing LWN subscriber links for karma. They're not meant to be shared in social news websites. https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks

20 of the poster's last 30 submissions have been LWN subscriber links.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

They're not meant to be shared in social news websites.

From your link:

"Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?

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."

debugnik• 4 years ago

Having access to nearly every paid LWN article on a news aggregator certainly feels like "a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers". But others said these links are subscriber-specific so I guess LWN is fine with it if they aren't taking the links down.

Macha4• 4 years ago

As well as LWN's declared policy, the subscriber links are also linked to the user that generated them - if LWN felt they were being abused, they could disable that user's access to them.

lynguist3• 4 years ago

According to Wikipedia, Intel’s 945 chipset for Core 2 processors ships with UEFI. This was originally released in 2006.

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.

lynguist3• 4 years ago

I found that the latest BIOS only devices were released in 2013 which are based on the AMD Bobcat processor (AMD’s version of Intel Atom). I wouldn’t know what operating system to run on those systems.

cestith2• 4 years ago

OpenBSD 7.1 was just released and supports my G5 Mac. It also supports i386, UltraSparc, and Digital Alpha.

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?

lynguist3• 4 years ago

According to discussions on the Gentoo [1] and Fedora [2] forums, i686 without SSE2 could be broken in some packages in subtle ways. One is that the stack alignment changed from 4 bytes to 16 bytes, another is long NOPs, another is that some software seems to require SSE2 on i686 like rustc or qt.

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...

BirAdam• 4 years ago

At a time when the world is producing several hundred million tons of e-waste each year, that this was even entertained is bad. I suppose its fine to make toxic trash mountains in the third world to get rid of a small amount of code bloat?

mustache_kimono2• 4 years ago

Anyone who says things like this, should be the ones that have to support the legacy code. They should be sentenced to a 15+ year old computer and to explain to their colleagues how we just can't do anything new, because we need to use GCC 4.7 to build the world because <legacy CPU>, now used by 20 non-paying users, won't work with anything newer.

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?

probably_wrong• 4 years ago

They should be sentenced to a 15+ year old computer

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.

userbinator4• 4 years ago

Leave things as they are. Code continues to rot.

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! ;-)

tenebrisalietum2• 4 years ago

The intersection point between simple and useful is this:

- 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.

userbinator4• 4 years ago

I don't think firmware should care at all about filesystems, because that's already halfway towards being an OS. It should just load the first sector from the selected boot device and jump to it.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

This is a bit of a tone deaf idea to explore right now. If anything, the environment and chip shortage issues should be pushing people to promise extending support for older systems for another decade.

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.

bitwize3• 4 years ago

Contrasting this, some UEFI implementations are horrifically buggy and largely seem designed to only work with Windows.

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".

li2uR3ce• 4 years ago

That said, while there are loads of systems out there that could still use BIOS, I like to look at the second hand market.

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.

ancientsofmumu• 4 years ago

Side note: Red Hat disabled the kernel code for the Perc 6/I raid card which is standard in the basic R710 chassis starting with RHEL8.

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.

zaolin• 4 years ago

The whole step moving forward into the UEFI direction on Client Computing Systems (laptops, desktop) is the right way.

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.

cestith2• 4 years ago

A whole lot of the maintenance headache could be solved by choosing five or fewer BIOS implementations to fully support and letting everything else go by the wayside. Choose the ones from VMware, VirtualBox, and such and a couple of popular server and desktop ones.

egberts1• 4 years ago

You will have to pry that BIOS from my cold dead hands.

Burnt EEPROM still remains the ultimate security.

rvp-x• 4 years ago

Fedora didn't even support UEFI on their cloud images before Fedora 35, released 5 months ago.

https://pagure.io/cloud-sig/issue/309

kevinoid• 4 years ago

Perhaps this is a good time to ask: I'd like to use UEFI for my qemu+libvirt virtual machines, but I need snapshot support. Since QEMU doesn't support pflash internal snapshots <https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/commit/9e2465834f4bff40...> and libvirt can't revert or delete external snapshots <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1519002>, I don't see a way to achieve this. The issue was discussed on virt-tools in 2017 <https://listman.redhat.com/archives/virt-tools-list/2017-Sep...> and the situation appears to be unchanged. Do others have a workable solution?

Scramblejams• 4 years ago

In my admittedly limited time using Linux (switched to it full-time in ~2001), the total amount of effort I've spent troubleshooting issues has probably been dominated by two categories:

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?

dralley5• 4 years ago

Apple gets to use firmware and only worries about one type of OS,

And a very, very narrow set of potential hardware compared to the entire PC ecosystem.

ElectricalUnion• 4 years ago

what would it take to make a PC bootloader work just as nicely?

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.

codedokode• 4 years ago

UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against

But is it actually tested against or only can be?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

Good. More time to work on new stuff.

Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS

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