Will installation on BIOS systems with no ESP be supported in 21.04?

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2021 at 04:16, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> To me the whole thing is useless and reading something like
>
> "What is the UEFI Forum?
[...]

> sounds like snake oil to me.

:-D A little bit.

The BIOS was well past its sell-by date. It is very definitely legacy
tech, dating right back to the 8088/8086 era and the original IBM PC,
and Compaq's reverse-engineering effort to clone it. It is not really
relevant to modern 64-bit computers.

Similarly, the MBR disk partitioning scheme dates back to MS-DOS 3.
IIRC, DOS 3.0 introduced support for 32MB HDD partitions, DOS 3.2
supported 2 of them, and DOS 3.3 supported multiple logical partitions
inside an extended partition. Compaq DOS 3.31 added bigger FAT
clusters for up to 2GB partitions, standardised in PC DOS 4, and then
Win95B added FAT32.

That was the last big change to the partitioning system: support for
over 2GB disk partitions. Now disks over 2TB are affordable; I have a
2TB backup disk which is in a notebook-sized 2.5" form factor.

So, yes, both the BIOS and the MBR were due for replacement.

But there were other standards. Open Firmware was a Sun standard and
it goes back to the early 1990s, I think. It runs on SPARC, IBM POWER
and Apple PowerPC, ARM, MIPS and others.

I know of at least one OpenFirmware x86 machine: the OLPC XO-1 laptop.

But I think Intel wanted UEFI because AMD was setting the direction of
the PC industry with x86-64, and this was a strategic move by Intel to
reclaim some control.

> IIUC a consumer end-user benefits from trouble, due to "smart"
> implementations.

Agreed.

> Unfortunately "legacy BIOS mode" is also fishy, but it still offers
> less painful experiences and doesn't require an obscure FAT partition.

Also agreed.

However I am happy to say that after I discussed this bug on Twitter,
Reddit, Ubuntu Discourse and Hacker News, within days, it was taken on
by someone, a fix written, applied and incorporated.

With any luck it will be possible to install 21.04 on machines in BIOS
mode without an ESP.

It is a shame that I never got Ubuntu to take the broken keyboard
controls in LibreOffice  under Unity so seriously. They broke it with
their Gtk-theme-integration in 2013 and it never got fixed; you could
not navigate LibreOffice's menus with the keyboard ever again, unless
you removed the Ubuntu themes-integration package. This made LO look
nasty, but it also made its UI fit onto the 1024×600 screen of my old
Acer Aspire netbook, so I put up with it.

-- 
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