The future of loading using BIOS for SUSE and Opensuse distributions may be in jeopardy, as Luboš Kocman, responsible for the preparation of the Opensuse releases, reported that the company SUSE is considering stopping support for BIOS loading. This move would make it impossible to use SUSE and Opensuse on systems without UEFI support. The decision to halt BIOS support is driven by the upcoming Sles 16 and Opensuse Leap 16 releases, which will be designed for the X86-64-V2 architecture, encompassing extensions like SSE3, SSE4_2, SSSE3, PopCNT, LAHF-SAHF, and CMPXchg16b.
Developers are skeptical about the existence of equipment in everyday life that uses the X86-64-V2 architecture but lacks UEFI support. However, in the realm of virtualization systems, where the BIOS-based mode is common for loading virtual machines, the transition should not pose a significant issue. Virtualization systems like KVM, Xen, and Virtualbox can easily emulate UEFI. Intel-based platforms have been UEFI-compliant since 2005, with Intel discontinuing BIOS support for client systems and data centers in 2020.
Notably, the Fedora distribution had plans to phase out BIOS support by 2020 and 2022. However, the project’s Technical Committee rejected these proposed timelines, indicating a divergence in approach compared to SUSE’s potential trajectory.