Yes. BIOS. Real mode. Not that I've been missing them these 30 years, and they are still in place. It gives a weird feeling.
I mean, if you target ancient baroque hardware like e.g. ZX Spectrum, you specifically target an ancient machine. But this is expected to work on any modern x86 hardware, while it feels like code for a 80286, and likely would run there. And this ancient stuff is still supported and actively used.
It's not supposed to be better than lilo, just code golf. Limine is pretty much the only serious bootloader gunning for the spot lilo/elilo was going for.
I love MBR hacking, it's so fun to see. Cf. sector lisp [1] and OSle [2].
[1]: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43866585
This is Bootloader ID #11 with comments
See:
http://sebastian-plotz.blogspot.de
https://docs.kernel.org/arch/x86/boot.html
I use this bootloader in gokrazy and blogged about debugging a limitation in it a while ago: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-02-11-minimal-linux...
https://sebastian-plotz.blogspot.com/
Kind of cool, but being exclusively for BIOS/MBR kind of kills my excitement.
With EFI, you can just boot straight into Linux without any bootloader.
Technically there's a pe shim, no?
You can just package Linux as a PE executable.
Yes. BIOS. Real mode. Not that I've been missing them these 30 years, and they are still in place. It gives a weird feeling.
I mean, if you target ancient baroque hardware like e.g. ZX Spectrum, you specifically target an ancient machine. But this is expected to work on any modern x86 hardware, while it feels like code for a 80286, and likely would run there. And this ancient stuff is still supported and actively used.
Do I see it right that I need to recompile and reinstall it on each new kernel?
I don't see how this is better than lilo.
It's not supposed to be better than lilo, just code golf. Limine is pretty much the only serious bootloader gunning for the spot lilo/elilo was going for.
It’s not meant to be full-featured. It shows how to write a bootloader that’s smaller than 512 bytes.