LinuxBoot


LinuxBoot is a free software project aimed at replacing most of the modules in UEFI firmware with the Linux kernel. LinuxBoot must run on top of hardware initialisation software in order to start. This can be the part of UEFI, coreboot, or U-Boot. It can boot Linux through the kexec syscall, but is also able to boot Windows with a different method.

History

Originally, the project was started as NERF by Google. NERF was a stripped down version of EFI which contains a Linux kernel and userland applications. This project has been split up into LinuxBoot and u-root, which contains the userland application.
LinuxBoot became an official Linux Foundation project in 2018.

Hardware support

Currently, the EFI support of LinuxBoot is limited to a few servers:
LinuxBoot is in theory also supported on all the mainboards that are supported by the coreboot project, which does include the OCP Monolake. In practice, the support is limited due to flash size constraints.