• neuromancer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The idea is that if a machine defaults to “legacy boot,” meaning a BIOS-style boot, then use that to load U-Boot, which then provides a software emulation of UEFI so that the startup process can be simplified by the removal of BIOS support.

    Sounds more like the illusion of simplicity

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Sounds like more complexity for the legacy use case in return for less complexity in the expected use case. Probably a fair trade-off.

    • EmbeddedEntropy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think they’re trying to simplify the exposed interfaces simplifying everyone else’s job at the expense of making a more complex implementation.

      • neuromancer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It would hurt some projects.

        Just as an example, A small project Qubes OS supports UEFI, but a lot of the UEFI implementations from different manufactures are broken or don’t follow the standards. Qubes OS doesn’t have the developer resources to fix issues with motherboards or laptops only used by a handful of users, so when all else fails the solution is to use legacy mode.

        Coreboot also uses legacy boot for some payloads.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Why not?

              “many public cloud vendors also default to BIOS booting of their VM instances”

              So it’s about cloud VMs.

              • neuromancer@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It’s 2023. By this time I’m fine if BIOS boot was removed completely

                I was replying to that post.

                But I guess read the thread before posting was too much to ask.

      • dartanjinn@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Are there any machines in use anymore that don’t support UEFI? When did it become standard? Something like 2012?

        • EmbeddedEntropy@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          At my company, we have around 400,000 servers in production. When we last surveyed them, we found several thousand over 12 years old, with the oldest at 17 years. And that wasn’t counting our lab and admin servers which could run even older because they’re often repurposed from prod decomms.

          We had a huge internal effort to virtualize their loads, but in the end, only about 15% were transferred just due to the sheer number of hidden edge cases that kept turning up.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Are there any machines in use anymore that don’t support UEFI?

          As the article explains, the move is about VMs but IMO it would make more sense to improve UEFI support in VM solutions than this.