Linux Format

Kernelstub

Version: 4.0.0 Beta 2 Web: https:// github.com/isantop/kernelstub

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almost all Linux distributi­ons nowadays use

GRUB2 as a bootloader and except for a few rare systems with Elilo, there’s virtually no alternativ­e. However, as virtually all desktop machines these days are Efi-enabled, there are some better options for you.

EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface, and it is a smarter replacemen­t for the legacy BIOS method of initialisi­ng your hardware at boot time. Your hard drive has a small EFI system partition (ESP) located at the beginning of the drive. This is always mounted at /boot/efi and contains files required to boot your system. Usually, most Linux makers use the Grub2-efi package to provide the classic boot menu at startup, but many people have only one OS and would prefer a speedy and silent boot instead of seeing the interface each time they press the power button.

Kernelstub is a handy utility that gets rid of GRUB2 or any other third-party bootloader completely. It creates a boot record in the NVRAM of your Efienabled firmware and tells it to boot your Linux directly, provided you have put the Vmlinux and Initrd files in the ESP partition beforehand. In some ways kernelstub is a wrapper for Efibootmgr, the de-facto standard EFI manager in most Linux distros. The main purpose of

kernelstub is to provide a friendly command-line interface for managing EFI boot records in NVRAM.

Grab the code and install kernelstub with the following command:

$ sudo python3 setup.py install

The simplest use example is as follows:

$ sudo kernelstub -o “your options in these quotes”

By default, kernelstub applies quiet splash to the options list, so there’s no need to add it explicitly. The applicatio­n has an extensive help section and lets you specify many things by hand.

 ??  ?? Boot your Linux directly using this smart and advanced wrapper for Efibootmgr.
Boot your Linux directly using this smart and advanced wrapper for Efibootmgr.

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