Intel aims to end legacy BIOS support by 2020

[aidanjt]

Don't really care if they ended support today, much less in 3 years time, any OS I'd care to use has UEFI support, and any legacy OSes I have temporary need of, I'd just run through virtualisation anyway. CSM is literally the first thing I disable with any new system.

[aidanjt]

True but it's a lot easier (afaik) to neuter in a BIOS (read older system)

It isn't. CSM only implements a BIOS interface in the UEFI, so OSes that don't have UEFI support can boot and run, it's still fundamentally a UEFI machine. And IME runs whether or not the machine is is powered on at all (still needs to be hooked up to a power source, of course).

And AMD are also using UEFI, and their own version of IME called PSP. So the only way you can avoid this stuff is either by running ancient hardware, or move in under a rock some place.

[Corky34]

That's not my understanding, it would seem to be easier to remove on older system.

Before Nehalem (ME version 6, 2008/2009) the ME firmware could be removed completely from the flash chip by setting a couple of bits inside the flash descriptor, without the need to reverse-engineer the ME firmware.

Starting from Nehalem the Intel ME firmware can't be removed anymore: without a valid firmware the PC shuts off forcefully after 30 minutes. This project is an attempt to remove as much code as possible from such firmware without falling into the 30 minutes recovery mode.

[aidanjt]

That's not my understanding, it would seem to be easier to remove on older system.

We seem to have gotten our wires crossed here. Intel isn't ending PC-BIOS support, that already happened years ago. What Intel is ending now is BIOS emulation in UEFI. And yes there, that confirms what I said above, there's no avoiding UEFI and low-level security modules with modern hardware.

[Corky34]

We seem to have gotten our wires crossed here.

Ahh yes we have, sorry about that, my fault.

[DanceswithUnix]

I envy you - I would have loved to have started OSdev'ing back them. Unfortunately that was a long time before I even existed.

I was reminded of this thread when reading news about J-Core and Risc-V processors. In an era when you can affordably buy an FPGA board and tinker with your own CPU it could be argued that *this* is the golden age of OS hacking.

http://j-core.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V