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Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says (phoronix.com)
Michael Larabel, writing for Phoronix: 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.
Intel has set deadlines for the death of BIOS and they came and passed and there was still BIOS.
This time they seem a bit more serious about it, but the UEFI vendors are planning to continue allowing CSM so long as they have customers.
Intel NICs may stop providing BIOS boot roms, new Intel storage devices may be only UEFI bootable. It will get harder and harder and more and more cases will require UEFI boot.
UEFI boot has gotten pretty normalized, it's a bit weird to formalize vfat as a required portion of the standard, but it is better than the MBR approach. UEFI runtime services are not as good as they should have been, but they do however take some memory away from the OS that BIOS and BIOS style boot of UEFI did not have to reserve.
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