Given that non-UEFI BIOS systems are quite old at this point and Intel/AMD systems for the past number of years have all supported UEFI, another change proposal being considered this week by Fedoa Linux is limiting the release-blocking status of various (non-UEFI) BIOS systems.
Fedora would still support non-UEFI BIOS systems but the scope that any issues discovered would hold up a Fedora Linux release would be more limited. Due to BIOS and UEFI testing effectively doubling the amount of testing/QA work by Fedora teams, Fedora is looking at simplifying their BIOS system verification.
BIOS mode support would still be considered release-blocking but if this proposal goes through it would be only release-blcoking for default partitioning layouts on NVMe and SSD storage, the fallback video driver support wouldn’t block releases, and booting CoreOS images in BIOS-only mode would no longer be considered blocking.
Proposal: Reduce BIOS-based systems release blocking status from covering all scenarios (on parity with UEFI) to just limited scenarios. The following would stay release-blocking in BIOS mode:
– Installations of release-blocking desktops, Server and Everything images which use the default automatic partitioning layout to a single empty SATA or NVMe drive.
– Cloud image boot in Amazon EC2 (no change).
– System upgrades (no change).
– OS and application functionality (no change).
– Anaconda rescue mode (no change).
– Both bare metal systems and virtual machines are covered in the cases above.The following use cases would no longer be release-blocking in BIOS mode (but would be kept blocking in UEFI mode):
– Any partitioning layouts not specified above.
– Any storage device types not specified above.
– The fallback video driver (available as the “basic graphics mode” from the install media).
– Booting CoreOS images (in BIOS-only mode).
The proposal is still being considered and for those interested can learn more via the Fedora discussion list.
