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Solus Is Getting Its Own UEFI Boot Loader Forked from gummiboot

Another piece of interesting news from the Solus project

Nov 25, 2015 16:19 GMT  ·  By
Solus in action
   Solus in action

Booting operating systems on UEFI powered machines is just another problem that needs to be taken care of by Linux developers. The Solus OS people are now working on a gummiboot fork, which is acting as a UEFI boot loader.

UEFI is definitely one of the major issues that still need to be addressed and all Linux developers usually ran into it when they are looking to build a distro. Until the world moves to something better and more open than UEFI (not happening anytime soon), the Linux world will have to find a way to coexist with this intrusion.

It was presented as a security feature, and, in theory, it should work, but it’s difficult to integrate into Linux OSes. Now the Solus OS developers need to take into consideration that booting on UEFI systems is important and needed to be taken care of.

Fortunately, they don’t have to try to work from scratch, and they have forked gummiboot. Technically, it’s not really a fork, since the project is basically dead upstream, but we’ll go along with it since it’s a little too complicated and annoyingly bureaucratic to talk about it.

Solus can boot and install on UEFI systems

The gummiboot fork is now called goofibootm, which is a nice touch. Since there is a lot of work left to be put into this project, it will be a while until it is properly integrated. Gummiboot was already integrated into Solus, so this fork will give developers much better control.

“As a heads up, we've forked gummiboot, the UEFI boot loader for Linux. It should be noted that gummiboot itself is dead upstream, and was ‘merged’ into the systemd tree as systemd-boot. Currently Solus uses gummiboot for UEFI everywhere, and as we need certain behaviours that systemd-boot will not be providing, and we've been told categorically it's not a successor, we're providing our own successor,” Ikey Doherty said on Google+.

You can download the latest Solus build and give it a spin. Make sure to upgrade if you want the latest packages and features. The stable version of Solus is expected to land before Christmas.