Hi Liam,
> CSM is short for Compatibility Support Module. It is a module that > enables UEFI firmware to also support "legacy" booting, i.e. BIOS > compatibility. Windows 7 required this. > > UEFI vs BIOS is either-or. A single machine can't have both There are machines where you can select whether you want to boot an UEFI capable operating system or not. When you say you want to boot a non-UEFI operating system like DOS, the system might either activate a CSM or switch to BIOS based booting - for me as user, the difference would be hard to tell. But as said, machines exist which support both modern UEFI style booting and DOS compatible booting in some way. I agree that it will be tricky to ask vendors which styles their machine supports, but actually my impression is that support for booting DOS is not that exotic yet. At least in computers ten years ago - which already had PCIe, space for many gigabytes of RAM, multiple cores etc. - booting DOS was no problem at all :-) Wikipedia says UEFI became more popular since 2010 and some vendors have stopped to include CSM since 2020. That means *most computers made before 2020 had CSM* and will happily boot FreeDOS from most MBR-partitioned drives. An exception from the 2020 statement: In 2006, Apple sold EFI- only computers, but added a Bootcamp CSM the following year. Wikipedia writes 230 mainboards are supported by Coreboot, so that and OpenBIOS might be useful in some special cases. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
