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Limine 9.0 Bootloader Drops EXT4 File-System Support (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/linux@programming.dev

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Limine 9.0 is out today as the newest major release for this open-source modern multi-protocol bootloader and boot manager. Limine also boasts its own Limine Boot Protocol in addition to the native Linux support and chainloading/multiboot capabilities.

One change that will surprise some readers is Limine 9.0 doing away with EXT4 file-system support as well as older EXT2 and EXT3 support. The change-log notes of dropping the EXT4 file-system support:

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[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (10 children)

Limine instead is focusing on the FAT32 file-system support and ISO9660 for boot medium storage.

That seems odd...? I'd love if anyone more knowledgable could chime in, why build a new bootloader and focus on FAT32...?

I generally associate the FAT filesystems with windows (no idea how accurate that is, probably not very), and I think most of linux is ext4 and moving towards btrfs and other newer filesystems

Windows doesn't need a bootloader, and I can't think of a time I heard of linux using FAT32, is that different in the enterprise or BSD world? What is a bootloader focused on FAT32 and ISO9660 for?

[–] Limitless_screaming@kbin.earth 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

In their repo, under "Limine's Design Philosophy" -> "Why not support filesystem X or feature Y? (eg: LUKS, LVM)":

The idea with Limine is to remove the responsibility of parsing filesystems and formats, aside from the bare minimum necessities (eg: FAT*, ISO9660), from the bootloader itself. It is a needless duplication of efforts to have bootloaders support all possible filesystems and formats, and it leads to massive, bloated bootloaders as a result (eg: GRUB2). What is needed is to simply make sure the bootloader is capable of reading its own files, configuration, and be able to load kernel/module files from disk. The kernel should be responsible for parsing everything else as it sees fit.

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

This reply and one other were super helpful, thank you for helping me understand!

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