Gummiboot Gains PE File Searching Support To Find Linux Kernels

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gummiboot Gains PE File Searching Support To Find Linux Kernels

The Gummiboot simple UEFI boot manager hasn't seen much improvements in recent months but on Friday received a new feature over the course of several hundred new lines of code...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gummiboot-UEFI-PE-OS-Release

[uid313]

Think if Linux used PE instead of ELF?

Would that be possible?
Would that be good or bad?

[Kano]

You can use Linux since 3.3 (with backports in Debian with 3.2) as EFI binary to boot without grub (directly via efi) or with simple bootmanagers like gummiboot. Older kernels supported the use of rdev to specify the root partition. But right now i dont see a way to do so, maybe something has changed in the meantime...

[gens]

Think if Linux used PE instead of ELF?

Would that be possible?
Would that be good or bad?

possible, why not
probably wouldn't be that hard either

good ? bad ? same ?
mostly same (although compatibility with any other OS goes out the window)

http://ange4771.imgur.com/

graphic representations of formats
note that ELF has more stuff that are not drawn here (PE probably also)