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.
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.
It’s 2023. By this time I’m fine if BIOS boot was removed completely.
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.
Not really related to what Red Hat is doing with their OS.
Why not?
Qubes OS use Fedora for dom0.
“many public cloud vendors also default to BIOS booting of their VM instances”
So it’s about cloud VMs.
I was replying to that post.
But I guess read the thread before posting was too much to ask.
Are there any machines in use anymore that don’t support UEFI? When did it become standard? Something like 2012?
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.
How many of them would ever run an OS released in 2023?
All of them. Corp directive (now) is that hosts must be updated or reimaged every 90 days.
I have a bunch of Intel motherboards circa 2015 that “support” UEFI as in it will boot windows but not any other payload.
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.
If the replacement is Coreboot thats OK, but if this is UEFI no thank you !