Fedora got into a sticky situation recently, when a proposal to drop 32-bit support sparked significant backlash from the community. The change, aimed at reducing maintenance overhead for maintainers, was met with opposition from users and developers who rely on 32-bit compatibility for certain use cases.
The response was strong enough that the proposal had to be withdrawn, but the change itself will still need to be tackled sometime in the near future to avoid ongoing maintenance challenges.
Now, a new change proposal has popped up, looking to drop UEFI boot support on MBR-partitioned disks.
End of UEFI Boot Support on MBR?
Posted by Katerina Koukiou of the Anaconda installer team, the change proposal aims to drop support for installing Fedora in UEFI mode on MBR-partitioned disks, specifically on x86-64 systems starting with the upcoming Fedora 43 release.
The goal with this is to simplify the installer code and stop supporting a boot configuration that is rarely used, inconsistently implemented across firmware configs, and not officially tested by Fedora.
Plus, this setup can cause the bootloader to crash, adding to its list of problems. In the merge request for this change, Katerina puts it like this:
This patch introduces a disklabel_types constraint in platform definitions and enforces it during bootloader device validation. For the x86 EFI platform, only GPT is permitted. Other EFI-capable platforms (e.g., Aarch64, Arm, RISCV64) are unaffected and may continue using MBR where appropriate - such as in cloud or embedded environments where MBR UEFI booting is still used.
This change will help us avoid bootloader crashes caused by firmware failures when MBR is used.
If you are an existing user, then you don’t need to worry, as this change won’t affect your installations. It only applies to new Fedora installations done via Anaconda, where GPT would be required instead of MBR for UEFI boot.
Also, while this change targets x86_64 systems, systems running Arm and RISC-V architectures will not be impacted by it.
This proposal is currently in the community feedback phase and needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) before it can be implemented. You can follow the conversation and contribute to it on Fedora Discussion.
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