A Single UEFI Executable With The Linux Kernel, Initrd & Command Line

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Single UEFI Executable With The Linux Kernel, Initrd & Command Line

Thanks to recent work done by systemd developers Kay Sievers and David Herrmann on Gummiboot, there's a UEFI boot-loader stub for starting a Linux kernel with an initial RAM disk (initrd) and kernel command line that are all embedded within the executable...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-Exec-Stub-Loader

[flubba86]

I like this.

[Guest]

I like this.

Same

(awaits inevitable systemd-doing-everything complaint)

[Zgembo]

I don't really see what is the point in all the efforts with UEFI 'bootloaders' as of lately. Linux EFI stub has been there for four solid years, so any fairly recent kernel (as well as initrd) can be loaded and booted directly from (U)EFI, without the need for any sort of bootloaders... Linux EFI stub is particulary suitable for setting up a rescue env, which can be added as one of the boot options by efibootmgr. For anything more advanced (meus, plethora of boot options) grub2 in its UEFI flavor will do just fine. Check http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/efistub.html

[duby229]

Cool. I'm looking at objcopy now.

[NotMine999]

Humm....

Phoronix: A Single UEFI Executable With The Linux Kernel, Initrd & Command Line

Thanks to recent work done by systemd developers Kay Sievers and David Herrmann on Gummiboot, there's a UEFI boot-loader stub for starting a Linux kernel with an initial RAM disk (initrd) and kernel command line that are all embedded within the executable...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ec-Stub-Loader

(obligatory systemd bait follows)

Can inclusion into the monolithic empire of SystemD(eath) be far behind? "All your hardware belongs to systemd!!!"

[msami]

I've been playing with uefi shell and efi stub last year, made a few kernel images as efi applications just for fooling around Additional kernel parameters could be set as an efi application argument when going through uefi shell. Nice thing anyway.

(obligatory systemd bait follows)

Can inclusion into the monolithic empire of SystemD(eath) be far behind? "All your hardware belongs to systemd!!!"

busybox & kexec & stuff...really no need for systemd. Depends on use case.

[bitman]

It is not practical for booting directly from such image. Try having multiple boot options... At least on my motherboard number is limited to 4 i think. And managing them is more manual than one would wish for. On the other hand if used with bootloader i can see advantages. Entire image could be signed and signature checked by bootloader whose signature in turn checked by firmware. That sounds pretty solid.

[curaga]

Hah, in this case the tools do not need systemd but the script does.

[duby229]

Exactly. The only tool that script invokes is objcopy.

After reading this post last night, I made a one line script that does the same thing without systemd.