On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 12:26 AM David C. Rankin <drankinatty@gmail.com> wrote:
Look at it from a COST/BENEFIT analysis.
How much does is cost SUSE to retain BIOS boot? How much benefit does SUSE gain by driving customers heavily invested in legacy hardware to some other vendor that will support them?
The costs for keeping legacy BIOS support are very high, It's doubling the efford. Currently EFI support is restricted to what legacy BIOS can do. As a result, everything has to be implemented into the bootloader. Look at how fat grub2 is, how many patches it has and what all is not possible with it, which are nobrainers if you use systemd-boot or grub2-BLS, so pure UEFI bootloaders. There are meanwhile many features which are not available with legacy boot. Keeping legacy boot would mean: 1. maintaining two complete different toolsets to set up booting, one for legacy BIOs, one for UEFI. I don't speak here about the bootloaders itself, I'm speaking here about all the scripts and hooks to set up the system correctly. 2. maintaining different bootloaders for the same architecture. 3. everything touching the bootloader or scripts around it need to be able to work with both variants.
I've always tried to avoid shooting myself in the foot -- if at all possible.
If the cost to SUSE to keep legacy boot outweighs the risk of losing those folks, well, then I guess it's "just business", screw 'em...
We are currently losing more customers because we cannot implement features with the current setup than we would lose with dropping legacy bios. And the requirements for these features are coming from e.g. data protection laws in the EU. So something you have to take seriously and which will affect more and more customers.
However if the cost to keep legacy boot is minimal, then I'd think twice before pulling the trigger.
The costs are high. If it would be for free we wouldn't think about it. Thorsten -- Thorsten Kukuk, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Future Technologies SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, 90461 Nuernberg, Germany Managing Director: Ivo Totev, Andrew McDonald, Werner Knoblich (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)