[News] Intel Halts Certain UEFI BIOS Class Level 2 Compatibility Modes In 2020

[StyM]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/int...s-in-2020.html

Intel will halt UEFI bios compatibility class 0, 1 and 2 support in 2020. From that moment onwards only UEFI class 3 will be supported. This means that Intel platforms cannot boot through the Compatibility Support Module mode, and that's a problem for dual OS boot systems.

Intel this way pretty much halts the traditional legacy BIOS support. The CSM provides additional functionality to UEFI. This additional functionality permits the loading of a traditional OS or the use of a traditional OpROM The news reached the webs though Brian Richardson, a developer at Intel. Recently he held a presentation on the topic at the UEFI Plugfest in Taiwan, reports tweakers today.

According to Brian the compatibility mode is still here as people want to bypass say the secure boot method, or have multi-OS boot settings. An advantage to discontinue the CSM support is that it will make room in the firmware for other stuff, initially, the BIOS would get significantly smaller in file-size. Also security-wise, the step would make a lot of sense.

Starting 2020 Uefo Class 3 will be the new standard at Intel, with secure boot enabled.

[drmrlordx]

Sucks for some Linux distros. Also bad for some USB boot options.

[NEOAethyr]

Yeah this has me worried a tiny bit.
Not being able to use dos is one thing, but i still don't want to lose that ability even if I don't use it.
I don't use fast boot, it's just to much of a pain to setup.
And there's the option rom stuff, etc.

Oh and linux, when you install an os in efi mode, omg that ticks me off, it makes a whole diff boot setup for grub.
And things just don't act right for me.
I stick to legacy mode, and I plan on sticking to it.

[drmrlordx]

One wonders if AMD will follow suit and do the same.

I haven't had any real problems with UEFI boot mode in Linux, though I find myself using the UEFI as a boot manager instead of something like GRUB since it seems to break pretty easily. Probably not what I'm supposed to do, but eh it works.

[Particle]

I wonder if I'll face any issues myself. I'm planning to reinstall Debian this week some time and switch from MBR to GPT at the same time. I installed Windows 10 a while back to play PUBG, and I found that my MBR GRUB boot loader is destroyed every single time I load Windows. My hope is that having both Windows and Debian use EFI boot loaders will make Windows happier. I ended up having to debootstrap a minimal Debian install onto a USB stick and make a chroot script that lets me switch into my primary OS, update-grub, sync, and then reboot.

The most annoying part of the problem is that when Windows does whatever it does to my other disk, it leaves most of the boot loader intact such that my motherboard gets confused when it's scanning for valid boot devices. There is a delay of about 30 seconds during startup where it flashes the disk light every 1 second before continuing. That will happen every time I reboot until I update-grub.