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Intel is planning to end "legacy BIOS" support in their new platforms by 2020 in requiring UEFI Class 3 or higher.
Making rounds this weekend is a slide deck from the recent UEFI Plugfest. Brian Richardson of Intel talked about the "last mile" barriers to removing legacy BIOS support from systems.
By 2020, they will be supporting no less than UEFI Class 3, which means only UEFI support and no more legacy BIOS or CSM compatibility support mode. But that's not going to force on UEFI Secure Boot unconditionally: Secure Boot enabled is considered UEFI Class 3+.
Intel hasn't removed legacy BIOS / CSM support yet due to many customers' software packages still relying upon legacy BIOS, among other reasons. Removing the legacy BIOS support will mitigate some security risks, needs less validation by vendors, allows for supporting more modern technologies, etc.
Source: Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:50PM (3 children)
I think the better question is what security problems were there with the BIOS in the first place.
There's plenty of reasons why we shouldn't be using the old school BIOS any longer, but security isn't really one of the ones I can think of. The BIOS was something that was cooked up when computers were less powerful and when the space available for such things was much smaller.
If we're concerning ourselves with security, why don't we have some sort of a toggle to turn the space dedicated to the UFI into read-only when we're not actively changing things?
(Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 25 2017, @04:50PM (2 children)
Well, there are three parts to the BIOS.
Part 1 is the hardware support. That's still required, and whether it is in the form of BIOS or UEFI doesn't really matter.
Part 2 is the service routines. Those are indeed outdated, and only used by ancient operating systems (with a few exceptions, which are used by the boot manager).
Part 3 is the boot system. That one was a perfectly good application of the KISS principle: All the BIOS had to know for this was how to read the first sector of any drive it might boot from. Everything else was then handled by the code found there. And frankly, I don't see why more should be needed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @11:14PM (1 child)
Most of the stuff that UEFI can do isn't something that the BIOS couldn't have handled with an updated standard.
The big thing that I don't think BIOS could reasonably have handled without major changes was allowing for you to run networking from a pre-boot environment. I messed around a bit with the Winki and it was OK, but the requirements for it were sufficient to make it pointless. IIRC, you had to have Windows in order for it to install and allow you to boot into it without booting up Windows.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Sunday November 26 2017, @12:17AM
BIOS has supported PXE since forever. It brings up the network card, grabs an address then uses TFTP to fetch the OS kernel.