LinuxBoot is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

project aimed at replacing most of the Driver Execution Environment (DXE) modules in

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a set of specifications written by the UEFI Forum. They define the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of ...

(UEFI) firmware with the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

. LinuxBoot must run on top of hardware initialisation software in order to start. This can be the Pre- EFI Initialization (PEI) part of UEFI,

coreboot coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and r ...

, or

U-Boot U-boats were naval submarines operated by Germany, particularly in the First and Second World Wars. Although at times they were efficient fleet weapons against enemy naval warships, they were most effectively used in an economic warfare role ...

. It can boot Linux through the

kexec kexec, abbreviated from ''kernel execute'' and analogous to the Unix/Linux kernel call ''exec'', is a mechanism of the Linux kernel that allows booting of a new kernel from the currently running one. Essentially, kexec skips the bootloader stage ...

syscall In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, acc ...

, but is also able to boot

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

with a different method.

History

Originally, the project was started as NERF by Google. NERF was a stripped-down version of EFI which contains a Linux kernel and userland applications. This project has been split up into LinuxBoot (which contains the bootblock and kernel) and u-root, which contains the userland application. LinuxBoot became an official

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

project in 2018.

Hardware support

Currently, the EFI support of LinuxBoot is limited to a few servers: *

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

R630 *

Open Compute Project The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an organization that shares designs of data center products and best practices among companies, including ARM, Meta, IBM, Wiwynn, Intel, Nokia, Google, Microsoft, Seagate Technology, Dell, Rackspace, Hewlett Pack ...

Winterfell, Leopard, Monolake and Tioga Pass *

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

S2600WF LinuxBoot is in theory also supported on all the mainboards that are supported by the coreboot project, which does include the OCP Monolake. In practice, the support is limited due to flash size constraints.

External links

FOSS Project Spotlight: LinuxBoot

References

Free BIOS implementations Firmware Custom firmware Software related to embedded Linux {{software-stub