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Submitted via IRC for Sulla
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: 5, Interesting) by sigterm on Saturday November 25 2017, @05:56PM (1 child)
>As far as I am concerned, EFI has exactly one benefit, complete compatibility
>with larger boot drives.
That's actually an issue with the OS boot loader, not the BIOS.
>MBRs are restricted to a maximum size of 2TB without workarounds.
No, the MBR *partitioning scheme* (really the partitioning scheme used by MS-DOS) is limited to 2^32 sectors, but that has nothing to do with the BIOS. You don't have to use that partitioning scheme if you don't want to. The BIOS only needs to find a boot loader at sector 0 (the Master Boot Record) of the boot drive, and that's fully compatible with the GPT.
Now, Windows does refuse to boot from a GPT drive unless loaded by UEFI services, but that's a limitation of the Windows boot loader. The two most common boot loaders used by Linux, GRUB and LILO, will happily boot from a GPT-partitioned drive. No workarounds required.
If Microsoft wanted to, they could have a BIOS-compatible GPT bootloader available by tomorrow. But that's probably not going to happen, as they're somewhat invested in Secure Boot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @06:19PM
Somebody should take the NT4 leak, or the OpenNT fork (if you can still find a copy online) and add GPT support to it.
Hell with a bit of knowledge of the code and some injection work one could probably support GPT on Windows XP and the Windows 6.0+ revisions as well, although you would probably need to disable driver/system file signing to get it to work.
There is literally no reason we can't have GPT bootable M$ OSes on traditional bioses except for microsoft's intentional deprecation, and no reason we can't have traditional bioses providing advanced boot services to GPT partitions so long as there is sufficient flash space for option rom boot service code.