In Fedora Linux 37, the transition to mandatory support for UEFI is scheduled for installation on the x86_64 platform. The ability to boot previously installed environments on systems with traditional BIOS will remain for a while, but support for new installations not using UEFI will be discontinued. In Fedora 39 or later, BIOS support is expected to be completely removed. The proposal for this change in Fedora 37 was published by Ben Cotton, who holds the position of Fedora Program Manager at Red Hat. The change has not yet been reviewed by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical side of Fedora's development.
Intel-based hardware has included UEFI since 2005. In 2020, Intel discontinued BIOS support in client systems and data center platforms. This discontinuation may lead to the inability to install Fedora on certain laptops and PCs released before 2013. Previous discussions also mentioned the inability to install on virtualization systems that only support BIOS, but since then, AWS environments have added UEFI support. UEFI support has also been added to libvirt and VirtualBox, but it is not yet enabled by default (planned in VirtualBox version 7.0).
The discontinuation of BIOS support in Fedora Linux will reduce the number of components used during boot and installation, remove VESA support, simplify installation, and decrease the maintenance workload of the bootloader and installation builds, as UEFI provides unified standard interfaces, while BIOS requires separate testing for each variant.
Additionally, a note can be made about the ongoing modernization of the Anaconda installer, which is being transitioned from the GTK library to a new interface built on web technologies, allowing for remote management through a web browser. Instead of the complicated installation management process through a summary screen of actions (Installation Summary), a step-by-step installation wizard is being developed. The wizard is designed using PatternFly components and allows focusing attention on single tasks, breaking the installation and solving complex issues into small and simple steps to be performed sequentially.
Source: opennet.ru
