2023-02-06 22:24:57 +03:00
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# Limine's Design Philosophy
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### Why not support filesystem X or feature Y? (eg: LUKS, LVM)
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The idea with Limine is to remove the responsibility of parsing filesystems and formats, aside from the bare minimum necessities (eg: FAT*, ISO9660),
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from the bootloader itself.
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It is a needless duplication of efforts to have bootloaders support all possible filesystems and formats, and it leads to massive, bloated
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bootloaders as a result (eg: GRUB2).
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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
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from disk. The kernel should be responsible for parsing everything else as it sees fit.
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### What about LUKS? What about security? Encrypt the kernel!
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Simply put, this is unnecessary. Putting the kernel/modules in a readable FAT32 partition and letting Limine know about their BLAKE2B checksums
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in the config file provides as much security as encrypting the kernel does.
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### What? But what if someone modifies the config file! Ha! You clearly have not thought about that!
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We have. While this is a pointless effort on legacy x86 BIOS, it is a reasonable expectation on UEFI systems with Secure Boot. Limine provides a
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way to modify its own EFI executable to bake in the BLAKE2B checksum of the config file itself. The EFI executable gets then enrolled or otherwise
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verified by the Secure Boot loader through, eg., the shim project. This prevents modifications being done to the config file (and in turn the
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checksums contained there) from going unnoticed.
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### What about ext2/3/4? Why is that supported then?
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2023-02-20 07:04:53 +03:00
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This is explicitly against the philosophy, but it is a pragmatic compromise since a lot of Linux distros and setups expect it to "work that way".
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2023-02-06 22:24:57 +03:00
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### But I don't want to have a separate FAT boot partition! I don't want it!!!
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Well tough luck. It is `$year_following_2012` now and most PCs are equipped with UEFI and simply won't boot without a FAT EFI system partition
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anyways. It is not unreasonable to share the EFI system partition with the OS's /boot and store kernels and initramfses there.
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