Limine
Limine is a modern, advanced bootloader with support for cutting edge features such as 5-level paging, 64-bit Long Mode, and direct higher half loading thanks to the stivale boot protocol.
History
Limine was created as the reference implementation for the stivale boot protocols. The protocols were conceived as a response to the shortcomings of Multiboot.
It does not support UEFI by design, but stivale is a firmware agnostic protocol and there exist UEFI implementations such as TomatBoot.
Supported protocols and filesystems
As mentioned above, Limine supports the stivale boot protocol, alongside Linux's own boot protocol (which means one can boot Linux fully using Limine), and chainloading to allow booting unsupported third party operating systems such as Microsoft Windows.
It supports the FAT32, ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems alongside the lesser known echfs file system.
How to use Limine with your kernel
The stivale Bare Bones article contains a basic tutorial on how to use Limine and the stivale protocol. Furthermore, a GitHub repository containing a simple example of a 64-bit kernel loaded with Limine can be found in the external links section.
External Links
- Limine source code on GitHub.
- Stivale boot protocol specification.
- Stivale2 boot protocol specification.
- Barebones example with Limine.
- TomatBoot (UEFI implementation of stivale)