Stivale

stivale means "boot" in Italian. It is a boot protocol designed to overcome shortcomings of common boot protocols used by hobbyist OS developers, such as Multiboot.

There are actually 2 revisions of the stivale boot protocol, namely: stivale, and stivale2. The earlier stivale revision (simply "stivale", but for clarity we are going to call it "stivale1" from now on), is a very simple "KISS" boot protocol only supporting what was deemed necessary at the time, but versioning and expandability issues made creating stivale2 a necessity. stivale2 makes use of tags for bootloader writers' and kernel writers' convenience, and to make future expandability and revisioning easier.

stivale is firmware and architecture agnostic, though the only bootloader fully supporting the stivale protocols as of writing this article (2021/01/09) is /pages/limine.html, which is an x86/x86_64 /pages/bios.html and /pages/uefi.html bootloader, with TomatBoot (now archived) and Sabaton offering limited stivale compliance for x86_64 UEFI exclusively, and aarch64, respectively.