I wrote a post for the other thread before I saw the link to this one, (good idea, Schol,) posting it here as more appropriate. Quotes are from the other thread. My biggest beef with obsoleting the old stuff is, sooner or later, we are going to get hobbyists with new or new-ish BIOS-based hardware designed for hobbyists. Also, my primary dev box is borderline for UEFI; a laptop of a type launched in 2007. And Bochs... does it still not support UEFI, or is our wiki info outdated?
At the same time, I would appreciate more and clearer UEFI info; I'm thinking of actually using it myself. I did not, for instance, know that almost all UEFI machines boot to 64-bit mode until I read thomtl's comment just now. I didn't even know 2007 was a transition year until I read JAAman's comments in the other thread.
JAAman wrote:
unfortunately, that meaty skeleton tutorial is designed for computers from the 1980s, and will not work on anything but emulators today -- that computer is far too modern for the meaty skeleton tutorial to work on it
the meaty skeleton tutorial (and all the barebones ones too) should probably be removed from the wiki (or at least moved to an "old deprecated information" subsection)
That's too strong, there are BIOS-based devices still being produced. Some new devices were released last year for industry and hobbyists. Outside those fields, BIOS and legacy hardware support is only just now starting to go away. The key is knowing the difference between BIOS & legacy hardware on the one hand, and UEFI on the other. Perhaps a note should be added to the BIOS-based tutorials, perhaps the converse of this:
JAAman wrote:
using UEFI, your code should work on all computers since 2012, most computers since 2007, and almost all emulators but will not work on most computers older than 2007
Perhaps the first page should be something like, "Know the difference between BIOS & UEFI".