Intel wants to remove the remaining barriers that prevent it from putting legacy BIOS into the ground. The company is now working on a plan to make that possible. Intel is looking to end support for legacy BIOS by 2020. It intends to do that by requiring UEFI Class 3 which doesn’t expose legacy BIOS interfaces.
For those who are unaware, BIOS was the firmware that older PCs rely upon to boot up after they’re powered on. It offered a runtime for the operating system and the software.
That’s no longer the case with modern computers as they feature UEFI or the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. However, they continue to support legacy BIOS in case users want to run software that requires 16-bit BIOS. They can enable that through the Compatibility Support Module.
It was revealed in a recent presentation by Intel technical marketing engineer Brian Richardson that Intel will require UEFI Class 3 and above. It’s going to ditch legacy BIOS support from both its client and datacenter platforms by 2020.
Richardson added that Intel wants to “eliminate components with no UEFI support” so that drivers, utilities, and peripherals work without CSM.
A report points out that Intel hasn’t made Secure Boot mandatory so it’s not like users won’t be able to run unsigned Linux distributions on PCs with UEFI. However, they won’t be able to prevent compatibility issues by using CSM on Intel-powered PCs.
Filed in . Read more about Intel.