Limine: Difference between revisions

'''Limine''' is an advanced, portable, multiprotocol x86/x86_64 [[BIOS]] and [[UEFI]] bootloader, with support for the Linux, Thethe [[Limine Bare Bones|native Limine boot protocol]], and [[Multiboot|multiboot1 and 2]], and [[Stivale|stivale1 and 2]] boot protocols (and serving as the reference implementation for these last two).

Limine was created as the reference implementation for the [['''stivale]]''' boot protocols. The protocols were conceived as a response to the shortcomings of [[Multiboot]]. As of Limine 3.0x, a new boot protocol, simply called the [[Limine Bare Bones|Limine boot protocol]] was introduced to supersede stivale 1 and 2. As of Limine 4.x, support for the legacy stivale protocols has been dropped.

It originally only supported x86 [[BIOS]] and the stivale1 protocol, but it was later expanded to also support [[UEFI]] and, the Linux and [[multiboot]] protocols, and other architectures such as aarch64.

As mentioned above, Limine supports the [[Limine Bare Bones|Limine]] and [[stivale]] boot protocolsprotocol, alongside Linux's own boot protocol (which means one can boot Linux fully using Limine), multiboot 1 and 2 (allowing it to boot a vast catalogue of hobby OSes and more), and chainloading to allow to undirectly boot unsupported operating systems such as Microsoft Windows.

It supports the [[FAT|FAT12/16/32]], [[ext2]], [[ext3]], [[ext4]], [[NTFS]], and [[ISO 9660]] (used by optical media and hybrid ISO images) filesystems alongside the lesser known [[echfs]] file system.