Luboš Kocman, responsible for preparing openSUSE releases, announced that SUSE is considering ending support for BIOS-based booting, which would prevent the use of SUSE and openSUSE distributions on systems without UEFI support. The decision to discontinue BIOS support is due to the fact that starting from SLES 16 and openSUSE Leap 16, package builds will be targeted for the x86-64-v2 architecture, which includes SSE3, SSE4_2, SSSE3, POPCNT, LAHF-SAHF, and CMPXCHG16B extensions.
Developers doubt that there is hardware in common use with the x86-64-v2 architecture that does not support UEFI. As for virtualization systems, for booting of virtual machines which often use BIOS-based modes, it is reported that this will not be an issue since KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, and other virtualization systems can emulate UEFI. Intel-based hardware has had UEFI support since 2005. In 2020, Intel ended BIOS support in client systems and data center platforms.
The Fedora distribution intended to stop supporting BIOS in 2020 and 2022, but the project's technical committee rejected these initiatives.
Source: opennet.ru
