Reply to post: Re: Ramifications

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ramifications

[Author here]

> Older hardware frequently have firmware updates and profiles which can only be loaded using a manufacturer's program, which runs only under some 16-bit operating system

It's certainly used to, and until not all that long ago. However, this is increasingly untrue of any x86 hardware that is new enough to still be under guarantee.

The reason is quite simple: to carry the Microsoft Windows compatible branding, a PC has to support booting in Secure Boot mode. Secure Boot only works in EFI Boot mode. You can't have Secure Boot and have legacy boot enabled at the same time.

So, in order to support secure boot, which you need to do in order to get that window sticker and the financial incentives that go with it, there is a strong pressure on manufacturers to only support EFI Boot mode by default. That means that the BIOS compatibility mode of EFI, which is usually known as CSM, for compatibility support module I believe, is increasingly disappearing. None of the recent Lenovo machines which I have reviewed for the Register support it any longer, for example.

As it happens, I have a personal hobby side project which involves booting MS DOS from USB keys, and it saddens me that it no longer works on most modern hardware. However this is just one of the many things about the modern PC and computer industry in general which saddens me. The sad fact is that Legacy or BIOS Boot is going away armour and is already missing from any machine manufactured since the 20 teens

This is also why increasingly PCs support Windows-based firmware updates, and in turn, that has the beneficial side-effect for Linux users that Linux based firmware updates become much easier. The gnome firmware tool supports updating not only system firmware, but that of SSDs, hard disk drives, a network controllers, and so on.

So while it is true that until just a few years ago, it was useful to be able to boot many PCs from a DOS USB key in order to update their firmware, that is actually becoming rare on more current PCs where this technique no longer works at all. It's 2023. Any PC that was manufactured before the 2020s is now probably out of warranty. And that probably means that any PC which supports booting from dos is now obsolete from the point of view of the accounts department. It's been deprecated, and if you asked nicely, it's the kind of cake that you can get to keep when you leave company. So that does mean there is properly more of it out there in the secondhand channel, but the secondhand channel for PCs is not a big one because most people are unable to judge if the kit is in good condition and still works and so forth.

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