New features in Limine 3.11

July 11, 2022 — BarryK

In the Limine menu, you can have an entry to chainload to a drive with an MBR (MSDOS partition table). Previously, the entry looked like this:

:MBR Chainload
   PROTOCOL=chainload
   DRIVE=1

The problem with that is we cannot guarantee what drive 1 is. Each drive in the computer is numbered, starting from 1, but the boot drive is not necessarily number 1.

To get around this uncertainty, MBR drives do have something called a "partition table UUID", that you can discover like this:

# lsblk --pairs -o PTUUID --nodeps /dev/sdb
PTUUID="c5e0f2d2"

I discussed this with mintsuki:

https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/issues/190

And now there is a new parameter:

:MBR Chainload
   PROTOCOL=chainload
   MBR_ID=c5e0f2d2

...this guarantees the correct drive will be chainloaded.

If you have, say grub4dos, installed on that drive, it will startup in the normal way and display its menu.

The second new feature resulted from discussion here:

https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/issues/191

Menu entry:

:Chainload next drive
    PROTOCOL=chainload_next

Here is the commit:

https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/commit/95272c5f1d0873efcd92403c7f9ec645246decce

Actually, I'm not 100% sure what it will do. I will have to play with it.

Tags: easy