Limine as GRUB alternative?

Development
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What is Limine?

Limine (pronounced as demonstrated here) is a modern, advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager, also used as the reference implementation for the Limine boot protocol.

  • Used by which OS?

CachyOS (from calamares they provide an option which one to choose grub or limine)

thoughts? @Patrick @arraybolt3 @HulaHoop

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Checklist:

  • packages.debian.org
  • compatible with Microsoft Secure Boot key based boot process
  • (compatible with shim)
  • Calamares integration
  • grml-debootstrap integration
  • live-build (ISO) integration
  • /etc/default/grub.d support equivalent (kernel parameter snippets)
  • /etc/grub.d support equivalent (boot menu entry snippets)
  • code review
  • just top of my head. Not an exhaustive list.

Most is probably some of:

  • unavailable
  • needs research
  • needs feature requests
  • needs pull request
  • more important work on our roadmap

So no, seems entirely unrealistic to replace GRUB in the next years.

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I’m not really sure what about Limine would be better than GRUB off the top of my head. It’s… different than GRUB, I guess, but does it have any specific security focus that GRUB lacks? Does it use programming techniques that will make it intrinsically safer than GRUB? Is its development team trusted or reputable for their high-quality code?

If the answer to those questions is “no”, I would suspect Limine would be a downgrade from GRUB in terms of security.

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Hypothetically, if we ported to Limine and then if GRUB improves support for GRUB Full Disk Encryption (encrypted /boot) would we flip flop back from Limine to GRUB?

To add:

  • measured boot
  • encrypted /boot
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Maybe we can ask them about all the GRUB lack features we want and check if it exist, will be supported, or not.