All* PCs require a VGA console to boot. Maybe there’s some special type that doesn’t, but it would be extremely rare. When running headless it’s just hiding the console window, but the device still exists on the machine.
Network appliances (Lanner, Netgate, Axiomtek, PC Engines, etc) typically only have a serial console and no GPU hardware at all. Same applies for any linux VMs, you can remove VGA devices and keep a serial port in the config
That's true, but there may be some some desktop BIOSes that will fail to boot without a display adapter—though I've had good luck on that on the few hosts I've made headless servers.
Fortunately the BIOSes shipping in hypervisors tend to be more sane, and QEMU for example can direct-boot a linux kernel without even needing to emulate a BIOS/EFI first.
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All* PCs require a VGA console to boot. Maybe there’s some special type that doesn’t, but it would be extremely rare. When running headless it’s just hiding the console window, but the device still exists on the machine.
Network appliances (Lanner, Netgate, Axiomtek, PC Engines, etc) typically only have a serial console and no GPU hardware at all. Same applies for any linux VMs, you can remove VGA devices and keep a serial port in the config
Linux has no problem booting without a VGA device present
That's true, but there may be some some desktop BIOSes that will fail to boot without a display adapter—though I've had good luck on that on the few hosts I've made headless servers.
Fortunately the BIOSes shipping in hypervisors tend to be more sane, and QEMU for example can direct-boot a linux kernel without even needing to emulate a BIOS/EFI first.