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Fedora Linux May Drop BIOS Support

Fedora Linux developers may soon end support for BIOS, in favor of UEFI.

Many Linux distributions support a combination of BIOS and EUFI, the successor to the aging firmware. UEFI offers a number features and advantages over BIOS. Intel created the predecessor to UEFI, EFI, but struggled to get manufacturers to adopt it until Apple switched to Intel. After that, other manufacturers began adopting the newer technology at a faster rate.

According to an official announcement, Fedora developers plan on dropping BIOS support in Fedora 37.

UEFI is defined by a versioned standard that can be tested and certified against. By contrast, every legacy BIOS is unique. Legacy BIOS is widely considered deprecated (Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Apple) and on its way out. As it ages, maintainability has decreased, and the status quo of maintaining both stacks in perpetuity is not viable for those currently doing that work.

It is inevitable that legacy BIOS will be removed in a future release. To ease this transition as best we can, there will be a period (of at least one Fedora release) where it will be possible to boot using the legacy BIOS codepaths, but new installations will not be possible. While it would be easier for us to cut support off today, our hope is that this compromise position will make for a smoother transition. Additional support with issues during the transition would be appreciated.