LinuxBoot is a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

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

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, as an acronym) is a Specification (technical standard), specification for the firmware Software architecture, architecture of a computing platform. When a computer booting, is powered on, the UEFI ...

(UEFI) firmware with the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. 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. It can boot Linux through the

kexec kexec (kernel execute), analogous to the Unix/Linux kernel call Exec (system call), exec, is a mechanism of the Linux kernel that allows booting of a new kernel (operating system), kernel from the currently running one. Details Essentially, kexe ...

syscall, but is also able to boot

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

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 organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

project in 2018.

Hardware support

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

Dell Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...

R630 * Open Compute Project Winterfell, Leopard, Monolake and Tioga Pass *

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

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.

References

External links

FOSS Project Spotlight: LinuxBoot
Custom firmware Free BIOS implementations Firmware Software related to embedded Linux Software using the GNU General Public License {{Linux-stub