Fedora 40 Eyes The Ability To Boot Unified Kernel Images Directly

www.phoronix.com Fedora 40 Eyes The Ability To Boot Unified Kernel Images Directly

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Is this good?
- It basically means instead of relying on a bootloader (e.g. GRUB or systemd-boot) the computer boots the kernel directly. Generally there should be no change besides having to use the BIOS menu to manually select a kernel.
  
  Thank you, you're awesome!
  
  No problem! :)
  FWIW, a lot of the DIY distros (Arch and Gentoo being the ones on most minds) allow this already so it's nothing new. It's just Fedora implementing it that's new I guess. If you're curious, the term to search is "EFISTUB".
  
  Is the benifit making secure boot work better?
  
  Presume so, that's what the article claims:
  This latest UKI work for Fedora will lead to better UEFI Secure Boot support, better supporting TPM measurements and confidential computing, and a more robust boot process.
  
  That's nice, stuff like that does make dual booting harder unfortunately
  
  I'd imagine that if you want a bootloader, the option is there as well. I can't imagine Fedora just doing away with that unless the bootloaders themselves are unmaintained.
- Yes, in my opinion. The configuration of grub (boot loader) is just another step to go wrong, and this will eliminate that possibility. Additionally, it will prevent stupider operating systems (cough Windows) from accidentally overwriting the boot loader during an update.
  
  Does that mean that the OS would have to handle version booting?
  
  My understanding is that’s a yes.
  
  Thank you
- I think for most people they won't care either way.
  Some people do legitimately occasionally need to poke around in GRUB before loading the kernel. Setting up certain kernel parameters or looking for something on the filesystem or something like that. For those people, booting directly into the kernel means your ability to "poke around" is now limited by how nice your motherboard's firmware is. But even for those people, they should always at least have the option of setting up a 2-stage boot.

23 comments