Intel Expects to End Legacy BIOS Support by 2020

This article examines Intel Expects to End Legacy BIOS Support by 2020. It presents the main facts, practical implications, and key points in a clearer, easier-to-follow format.

UEFI Last Mile

According to Richardson, Intel is focusing on UEFI Last Mile - an integrated firmware interface to remove old legacy codes in its products and focus on newer technologies like UEFI. This means that Intel will remove the BIOS.

Speaking at the UEFI Plugfest conference organized by UEFI Forum, Richardson cited the top three reasons why Intel removed the BIOS:

• Security risks - BIOS does not support standards for safe booting or signing executable code.
• Backward compatibility - New technologies will be freed from providing compatibility with BIOS.
• Troubleshooting code validation - BIOS requires 2 validation paths (CSM ON & CSM OFF).

As you know, BIOS is an acronym for Basic Input/Output System, an integrated firmware package in the motherboard and contains code to initialize hardware and system startup tasks.

The BIOS was released in 1981 and was replaced by UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in the 90s, one of the more common standards, can operate on many computer architectures and is not directly related to 16-bit mode of Intel x86 processor as BIOS.

In all respects, the new UEFI standard is much better than the old BIOS. It provides faster boot speed, more advanced security, extended configuration options and more universal architecture to support different hardware architectures.

All modern motherboards support one of the new versions of UEFI standards and modern operating systems that have supported UEFI since the early 2000s.

However, many users still choose to start their computer configuration using the BIOS. One of the main reasons is that there are too many errors when activating UEFI boot, some cases prevent users from using the computer completely.

Richardson also acknowledged the possibility of using UEFI in his presentation and said that Intel will soon solve those problems and make UEFI able to use the seamless experience for amateur users.

See also: Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, Panasonic are affected by Intel's security error.