Limine

x86/x86_64 BIOS Bootloader

Supported boot protocols

• Linux
• stivale and stivale2 (Limine's native boot protocols, see STIVALE{,2}.md for details)

Supported filesystems

• ext2
• echfs
• FAT32

Supported partitioning schemes

• MBR
• GPT

Building

Building the bootloader

Building the bootloader is not necessary as a prebuilt copy is shipped in this repository (limine.bin).

Should one want to build the bootloader to make sure the shipped copy is authentic, to develop, to debug, or any other reason, it is necessary to first build the set of tools that the bootloader needs in order to be built.

This can be accomplished by running:

make toolchain

After that is done, the bootloader itself can be built with:

make limine

A newly generated limine.bin image should now be present in the root dir of the repo.

This newly built image should match 1:1 (aka, same checksum) as the one shipped with the respective commit.

Compiling limine-install

A simple make and make install will suffice. Use the PREFIX variable with make install to specify where to install limine-install. It defaults to /usr/local.

How to use

In order to install Limine on a MBR device (which can just be a raw image file), run the limine-install as such:

limine-install <path to device/image>

If using a GPT formatted device, it will be necessary to create an extra partition (of at least 32K in size) to store stage 2 code. Then it will be necessary to tell limine-install where this partition is located by specifying the start sector.

fdisk <device>    # Create bootloader partition using your favourite method
limine-install <path to device/image> <start sector of boot partition>

Then make sure the device/image contains at least 1 partition formatted in a supported filesystem containing a /limine.cfg or /boot/limine.cfg file and the kernel/modules one wants to load.

An example limine.cfg file can be found in test/limine.cfg.

More info on the format of limine.cfg can be found in CONFIG.md.

For example, to create an empty image file of 64MiB in size, 1 echfs partition on the image spanning the whole device, format it, copy the relevant files over, and install Limine, one can do:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=0 seek=64 of=test.img
parted -s test.img mklabel msdos
parted -s test.img mkpart primary 1 100%
parted -s test.img set 1 boot on # Workaround for buggy BIOSes

echfs-utils -m -p0 test.img quick-format 32768
echfs-utils -m -p0 test.img import path/to/limine.cfg limine.cfg
echfs-utils -m -p0 test.img import path/to/kernel.elf kernel.elf
echfs-utils -m -p0 test.img import <path to file> <path in image>
...
limine-install test.img

One can get echfs-utils by installing https://github.com/qword-os/echfs.

Acknowledgments

Limine uses a stripped-down version of https://github.com/jibsen/tinf

Discord server

We have a Discord server if you need support, info, or you just want to hang out: https://discord.gg/QEeZMz4