4.9 KiB
Limine
What is Limine?
Limine (pronounced as demonstrated here) is a modern, advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager, also used as the reference implementation for the Limine boot protocol.
Donate
If you want to support the work I (@mintsuki) do on Limine, feel free to donate to me on Liberapay:
Donations welcome, but absolutely not mandatory!
Limine's boot menu
Supported architectures
- IA-32 (32-bit x86)
- x86-64
- aarch64 (arm64)
- riscv64
Supported boot protocols
- Linux
- Limine
- Multiboot 1
- Multiboot 2
- Chainloading
Supported partitioning schemes
- MBR
- GPT
- Unpartitioned media
Supported filesystems
- FAT12/16/32
- ISO9660 (CDs/DVDs)
- ext2/3/4 (NOTE: This is experimental and not supported. Maintainers wanted!)
If your filesystem isn't listed here, please read the philosophy first, especially before opening issues or pull requests related to this.
Minimum system requirements
For 32-bit x86 systems, support is only ensured starting with those with Pentium Pro (i686) class CPUs.
All x86-64, aarch64, and riscv64 (UEFI) systems are supported.
Packaging status
All Limine releases since 7.x use Semantic Versioning for their naming.
Binary releases
For convenience, for point releases, binaries are distributed. These binaries
are shipped in the -binary branches and tags of this repository
(see branches and
tags).
For example, to clone the latest binary release of the 7.x branch, one can do:
git clone https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine.git --branch=v7.x-binary --depth=1
or, to clone a specific binary point release (for example 7.13.2):
git clone https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine.git --branch=v7.13.2-binary --depth=1
In order to rebuild host utilities like limine, simply run make in the binary
release directory.
Host utility binaries are provided for Windows.
Building the bootloader
The following steps are not necessary if cloning a binary release. If so, skip to "Installing Limine binaries".
Prerequisites
In order to build Limine, the following programs have to be installed:
common UNIX tools (also known as coreutils),
GNU make, grep, sed, find, awk, gzip, nasm, mtools
(optional, necessary to build limine-uefi-cd.bin).
Furthermore, gcc or llvm/clang must also be installed, alongside
the respective binutils.
Configure
If using a release tarball (recommended, see https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/releases),
run ./configure directly.
If checking out from the repository, run ./bootstrap first in order to download the
necessary dependencies and generate the configure script (GNU autoconf required).
./configure takes arguments and environment variables; for more information on
these, run ./configure --help.
./configure by default does not build any Limine port. Make sure to read the
output of ./configure --help and enable any or all ports!
Limine supports both in-tree and out-of-tree builds. Simply run the configure
script from the directory you wish to execute the build in. The following make
commands are supposed to be run inside the build directory.
Building Limine
To build Limine, run:
make # (or gmake where applicable)
Installing Limine
This step will install Limine files to share, include, and
bin directories in the specified prefix (default is /usr/local, see
./configure --help, or the PREFIX variable if installing from a binary release).
To install Limine, run:
make install # (or gmake where applicable)
Usage
See USAGE.md.
Acknowledgments
Limine uses a stripped-down version of tinf for early GZIP decompression.
Limine relies on stb_image for runtime GZIP decompression and image loading.
Limine uses a patched version of libfdt (can be found in Linux's source tree) for manipulating FDTs.
Discord server
We have a Discord server if you need support, info, or you just want to hang out with us.