LinuxBoot is still very much alive ...

LinuxBoot operation diagram

We already talked about linuxboot on this blog, which was a system that I wanted replace UEFI, what a bad reputation it has. This project came about especially for HPC (based on x86), that is, for servers and supercomputers, which is where it is currently being applied. The Linux Foundation wants to replace UEFI entirely and this project is a huge step to displace this dull, slow, and sometimes crashing or security-laden firmware.

We already know that firmware has always had a simple purpose, which is to start the operating system. But with the increasing complexity of hardware, this is becoming more and more complex to implement. Currently, firmware has to configure many system components, with many interfaces or boot media, support advanced protocols and security features, and so on. Therefore, something simple has become a complex problem.

The start-up has three phases: SEC, PEI and DXE. The driver or DXE runtime environment is where the UEFI system loads the drivers for the configured devices. LinuxBoot will replace specific firmware functionality like this phase UEFI DXE with a Linux kernel at runtime. In addition to achieving greater startup reliability, it also offers better performance, as it can do so up to 20 times faster.

That has made it perfect for many servers and supercomputers, and also in many embedded and military applications. And we have good news since, although this project seems somewhat stopped, it is very much alive. It was discussed at the FOSDEM 2019 summit and engineers from Facebook and Google are very actively contributing to the project to release the hardware at a lower level. These two companies are using it to gain speed and reliability for their large machines, but they are not the only ones involved, we have also now known Horizon Computing, Two Sigma, 9elementes Cyber ​​Security, etc.


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