Limine v6 has dropped support for ext4

Limine bootloader, up until the 5.x releases, supports ext2/3/4; however, v6 has just been released and now only supports fat12/16/32 and iso9660. Forum member 'luvr' reported this a couple of days ago:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=105931#p105931

I raised an issue at the Limine github site, to which mintsuki, the main developer, replied:

https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/issues/320

For the foreseeable future it doesn't really matter, I think, as v5 has become quite mature, and it has been awhile since any problem booting with Limine has been reported. So we could just go on indefinitely with v5.

Anyway, I had another look at the alternatives. There is always grub2 of course, but then I stumbled upon a new project; Easyboot and Simpleboot:

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/easyboot

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/simpleboot

I worked on it for several hours, but couldn't get the boot menu to display; just something flashing momentarily on the screen. Then the menu would timeout and it reported the kernel could not be found.

After trying lots of variations, did manage to get the kernel to be found, but then it crashed. But it might be 'KERNEL8.IMG' provided by Easyboot, that crashed, not the EasyOS 'vmlinuz'.

Bootloaders need a lot of development to work on a wide range of quirky computer hardware.   

Tags: easy