LinuxBoot: A Linux Foundation Project to replace UEFI Components

Tech Drive-In ^ | 2 April 2019 | Manuel Jose

[ShadowAce]

UEFI has a pretty bad reputation among many in the Linux community. UEFI unnecessarily complicated Linux installation and distro-hopping in Windows pre-installed machines, for example. Linux Boot project by Linux Foundation aims to replace some firmware functionality like the UEFI DXE phase with Linux components.

What is UEFI?
UEFI is a standard or a specification that replaced legacy BIOS firmware, which was the industry standard for decades. Essentially, UEFI defines the software components between operating system and platform firmware.


UEFI boot has three phases: SEC, PEI and DXE. Driver eXecution Environment or DXE Phase in short: this is where UEFI system loads drivers for configured devices. LinuxBoot will replaces specific firmware functionality like the UEFI DXE phase with a Linux kernel and runtime.

LinuxBoot and the Future of System Startup
"Firmware has always had a simple purpose: to boot the OS. Achieving that has become much more difficult due to increasing complexity of both hardware and deployment. Firmware often must set up many components in the system, interface with more varieties of boot media, including high-speed storage and networking interfaces, and support advanced protocols and security features."  writes Linux Foundation.

LinuxBoot will replace this slow and often error-prone code with a Linux Kernel. This alone should significantly improve system startup performance.

On top of that, LinuxBoot intends to achieve increased boot reliability and boot-time performance by removing unnecessary code and by using reliable Linux drivers instead of lightly tested firmware drivers. LinuxBoot claims that these improvements could potentially help make the system startup process as much as 20 times faster.

In fact, this "Linux to boot Linux" technique has been fairly common place in supercomputers, consumer electronics, and military applications, for decades. LinuxBoot looks to take this proven technique and improve on it so that it can be deployed and used more widely by individual users and companies.

Current Status
LinuxBoot is not as obscure or far-fetched as, say, lowRISC (open-source, Linux capable, SoC) or even OpenPilot. At FOSDEM 2019 summit, Facebook engineers revealed that their company is actively integrating and finetuning LinuxBoot to their needs for freeing hardware down to the lowest levels.

Facebook and Google are deeply involved in LinuxBoot project. Being large data companies, where even small improvements in system startup speed and reliability can bring major advantages, their involvement is not a surprise. To put this in perspective, a large data center run by Google or Facebook can have tens of thousands of servers. Other companies involved include Horizon Computing, Two Sigma and 9elements Cyber Security.

[ShadowAce]

[sauropod]

bkmk

[trebb]

Would be great for us “lazy” folks who like it to go smooth w/o having to read up and ‘experiment”...

[Kommodor]

An SSD drive will improve boot performance too.

I’m not sure how much I want Google and Facebook involved in how my computer boots up. Then again, I’m sure M$ isn’t much better.

[GraceG]

I thought Apple had something like a linux/unix type BIOS way back in the late 90’s...

[Oshkalaboomboom]

Speaking of Linux boot, they are selling a gadget now that is a $35 USB drive with Linux on it called ExtraPC, or something like that. According to them you plug it into your old, slow Windows PC, boot off of the USB drive and the old, slow PC boots up in Linux that is set up to let you see all of your old Windows programs. In the time it takes to reboot you have a fast, bugfree, crashfree computer again. Have you heard of this and does it work?

[taxcontrol]

A good supporting page: http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/

[bicyclerepair]

Linux cinammon mint 17.3 is great. That’s what I have. Works better than windoze while using half the resources.

[ShadowAce]

I have heard of it, and yes, it does work.

However, you can buy a USB drive for much cheaper and just put a linux distro on it yourself.

[Still Thinking]

Yeah, but he says it “lets you see all your old Windows programs”, so it must be something more, or he’s interpreting their claims as something more than just a bootable Linux USB stick.

[ShadowAce]

I know what you're saying, but "see" and "execute" are two different things.

Linux distros have no problem mounting and browsing through Windows partitions.

[Still Thinking]

Yeah, I know. Kind of vague description. But note for example that he refers to Windows “programs” rather than “files” or “documents”. Can’t imagine anyone would care to just browse through the program files. Why?

[whodathunkit]

...but he says it “lets you see all your old Windows programs”

Seeing the programs and data is one thing but actually running the windows programs on Linux takes some doin'.

[ShadowAce]

Seeing the programs and data is one thing but actually running the windows programs on Linux takes some doin'.

Yes, and X-Tra PC only claims to allow you to see and access your old files. It makes no claims for running Windows programs.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

Is there a guide to doing an install with a flavor of Unix that mimics what you get with the Extra PC usb?

[Oshkalaboomboom]

After finding out that it really does work I started looking at reviews and it doesn’t let you run all of your old Windows programs. It looks like the cheapest version doesn’t even let you access your old Windows files. Basically it got trashed so maybe I will try messing around with a USB install of my own.

[ShadowAce]

Check out this article, though I have not personally read it, it should get you going in that direction.