Fedora Developers Discuss An Idea For Using U-Boot On x86 BIOS Systems

Last year Fedora and Red Hat developers began discussing the idea of dropping legacy BIOS support and to then only focus on UEFI platforms. There was a plan to deprecate BIOS support in Fedora 37 but ultimately it didn't go through due to some cloud providers still booting VMs in BIOS mode and some systems having broken UEFI implementations. An idea has now been raised over the possibility of using U-Boot on x86 BIOS systems to provide a UEFI-like experience from the Fedora perspective.

Similar to how U-Boot is used on Fedora for ARM to provide a UEFI-like environment on various targets, Fedora developer Neal Gompa raised the idea of possibly using U-Boot on x86 BIOS systems to fill the gap where UEFI cannot be directly used. For x86 systems without proper UEFI support would instead boot U-Boot to provide a UEFI-like environment to in turn boot Fedora.

At the moment this is just an idea being discussed on the developer mailing list but may be a novel solution for helping to fill the gap for still running Fedora Linux on x86 BIOS systems.

Those curious can see the current discussion being had on Fedora's devel list. It will be interesting to see if this materializes into a proof of concept and ultimately a change proposal for a future Fedora release.