The Linux Foundation announces LinuxBoot

The Linux Foundation introduces LinuxBoot. The software needs to replace some firmware functionality with a Linux kernel and runtime. The open source project has the support of Facebook and Google, among others.

According to the foundation, the reason for setting up the project for LinuxBoot is that booting firmware often involves hidden code that is slow and prone to errors. Replacing the code with a Linux kernel would improve performance and reliability.

The improvements would be useful in data centers, often with tens of thousands of servers, and LinuxBoot could also make management easier here, with additional debugging and boot options. This is probably why Google and Facebook are involved in the project. But LinuxBoot must also be usable for consumer devices and internet-of-things components, the organization writes.

Details about the software aren’t there yet, but Phoronix notes that LinuxBoot initializes Coreboot’s rom step and then U-Boot with uefi’s Pre-EFI Initialization step, specifically replacing uefi’s Driver Execution Environment. At this point, it would only work on a Dell R630 server.

In October last year it was announced that Google is working on non-extensible reduced firmware, or nerf for short, based on a compact Linux kernel. LinuxBoot seems at least partly based on that.