Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support

Fedora stakeholders are debating the merits of potentially ending legacy BIOS support for the Linux distribution and to only support UEFI-based installations.

Given Fedora 33 GRUB changes planned and things being easier if they were to just switch to the UEFI-based systemd sd-boot as well as Intel planning to end legacy BIOS support in 2020 and UEFI being very common to x86_64 systems for many years now, Fedora developers are discussing whether it's a good time yet for their bleeding-edge platform to also begin phasing out legacy BIOS support.

But not everyone is in agreement with the idea of Fedora dropping legacy BIOS support. Some users on 2012~2013 era hardware have already voiced frustrations over the possibility of not being able to use new Fedora releases on their UEFI-less hardware.

Another point raised is that some virtualization setups still default or heavily focused on legacy BIOS booting even though most key components have supported UEFI booting for VMs for some years now.

As of writing no formal feature proposal has been raised for ending legacy BIOS support / going UEFI only, but it's being discussed in this Fedora thread.

How do you boot your #Linux installations?

— Phoronix (@phoronix) June 30, 2020

We won't see this legacy BIOS dropping happen for Fedora 33 later this year considering the system wide change deadline is today, but perhaps in the next year or following year we'll see them go forward with their plans for dropping legacy BIOS support to better focus on modern hardware and also explore other possibilities like moving from GRUB to SD-BOOT.