Accelerating and simplifying booting

Posted Aug 22, 2025 6:09 UTC (Fri) by pmolloy (guest, #113754)
Parent article: Kexec handover and the live update orchestrator

This is also a really interesting feature for LinuxBoot, the idea of using a minimal kernel/initramfs as a boot loader to load and execute a runtime kernel or other operating system. Why load a chain of software that has to reinitialize from scratch at every stage when some state could be saved between stages? This is also a point of pain in current systems where boot loaders and runtime operating systems need to be carefully coordinated and leads to significant system complexity.

Accelerating and simplifying booting

Posted Aug 22, 2025 6:17 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Why load a chain of software that has to reinitialize from scratch at every stage when some state could be saved between stages?

I think the consensus at this point is that UEFI can just boot Linux directly, with a small bootloader written using the UEFI API.

Accelerating and simplifying booting

Posted Aug 22, 2025 6:28 UTC (Fri) by pmolloy (guest, #113754) [Link]

In my experience in computing consensus doesn't mean there aren't better options worth advocating for. But that's definitely off topic. Happy to discuss the topic further in the linuxboot.org community.

Accelerating and simplifying booting

Posted Sep 5, 2025 3:08 UTC (Fri) by FluffyFox (guest, #162692) [Link]

Linux does already support booting that way, through CONFIG_EFI_STUB and pair with CONFIG_CMDLINE, you can have a kernel know what to do when nothing gives it command line.

That is most simplest and favourite setup of booting kernel where the kernel has all compiled modules to use entire system and compiled in command line to know how to boot without relying on additional parameter given by other thing just tuck kernel bzImage into /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi (or other name depends on architecture) with single cp and kernel is updated.