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Red Hat looking to hire a bootloader developer
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Sounds like more complexity for the legacy use case in return for less complexity in the expected use case. Probably a fair trade-off.
I think they’re trying to simplify the exposed interfaces simplifying everyone else’s job at the expense of making a more complex implementation.
It's 2023. By this time I'm fine if BIOS boot was removed completely.
Not really related to what Red Hat is doing with their OS.
"many public cloud vendors also default to BIOS booting of their VM instances"
So it's about cloud VMs.
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.
2014 is when a majority of new systems were UEFI, according to Wikipedia, but that's still a majority.
Intel announced in 2017 that by 2020 they're no longer gonna include BIOS support in their computers. So it could easily still pop up today, although it's not that likely to, since that support is for devices that can use either BIOS or 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.
I have a bunch of Intel motherboards circa 2015 that "support" UEFI as in it will boot windows but not any other payload.
If the replacement is Coreboot thats OK, but if this is UEFI no thank you !