Dependency-free, suckless bootable disk image creator and boot manager
bzt 31d20593cf More docs | 2 weeks ago | |
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distrib | 2 weeks ago | |
docs | 2 weeks ago | |
src | 2 weeks ago | |
.gitignore | 1 year ago | |
LEAME.md | 1 month ago | |
LEGGIMI.md | 2 weeks ago | |
LICENSE | 1 year ago | |
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OLVASSEL.md | 1 month ago | |
PRZECZYTAJ.md | 2 weeks ago | |
README.md | 1 month ago | |
easyboot.h | 2 weeks ago | |
ПРОЧТИМЕНЯ.md | 1 month ago | |
リードミー.md | 2 weeks ago | |
自述文档.md | 1 month ago |
Easyboot is an all-in-one boot manager and bootable disk image creator that can load various OS kernels and Multiboot2 compliant kernels in various binary formats.
NOTE: If you're looking for a boot loader, that loads a single kernel only, then take a look at Easyboot's little brother, Simpleboot.
This project wouldn't have been possible without the support of Free Software Foundation Hungary. The project was created in appliance of FSF.hu's Free Software Tender 2023.
Supported kernels: Multiboot1 (ELF32, PE/COFF, a.out; BIOS, UEFI, RPi), Multiboot2 (ELF32, ELF64, PE32+/COFF, a.out; BIOS, UEFI, RPi), Linux (BIOS, UEFI, RPi), Windows (UEFI), OpenBSD (BIOS, UEFI), FreeBSD (BIOS, UEFI), FreeDOS (BIOS), ReactOS (BIOS), MenuetOS 32 / 64 (BIOS, UEFI), KolibriOS (BIOS, UEFI), SerenityOS (BIOS, UEFI), Haiku (BIOS, UEFI)
Supported file systems: FAT12/16/32, exFAT, NTFS (v3, v3.1), ext2/3/4, XFS (SGI), UFS (v2, v4.4), mfs (Minix3), BeFS (Haiku), AXFS (OS/Z)
(When the kernel is located on the boot partition then any file system can be used for root: ZFS, btrfs, etc.)
I've created a simple to use boot loader, and users were asking for more and more features. I wanted to keep that boot loader as simple as possible, but FSF.hu offered support, so I've decided to fork it and add all those requested features in this boot manager instead.
This is also a suckless tool like Simpleboot, has no dependencies, and extremely easy to use:
easyboot (source directory) (output image file)
commandYou can install the boot manager and make an existing device or image bootable; or you can create a bootable image anew. You can
boot that image in a VM, or you can write it with dd
or USBImager to a storage and boot
that on a real machine too.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication!
Just download the binary for your OS. These are portable executables, they don't require installation and they don't need any shared libraries / DLLs.
Furthermore you can find various packaging solutions in the distrib directory (for Debian, Ubuntu, RaspiOS, Gentoo, Arch).
When creating an image then (depending on your configuration) you might also need some plugins in your (source directory)
. You
can find these in the src/plugins directory using the extension plg
. When installed from a package, these will be
placed under /usr/share/easyboot
.
The detailed documentation on how to use the bootable disk creator and how a kernel is booted can be found in the docs directory.
If you want to write a kernel that can be loaded without any plugins using Easyboot's simplified Multiboot2 protocol, then take a look at Simpleboot Example Kernel directory. Both loaders use the same boot protocol, that kernel works with Easyboot as-is. You'll see that no Assembly nor embedded tags required, otherwise the source code is 99.9% the same as the example in the Multiboot2 specification (the only difference is, it prints to the serial console and not on the VGA teletype screen, because that latter doesn't exists on UEFI and on RaspberryPi machines).
GNU/make needed for orchestration (although it's literally just cc easyboot.c -o easyboot
). The toolchain doesn't matter,
any ANSI C compiler will do, works on POSIX and WIN32 MINGW too. Just go to the src directory and run make
. That's all.
Despite of it's small size, it is self-contained and compilation has exactly zero library dependencies. It's not called Easyboot
for nothing :-)
To recompile the loaders, you'll need the flatassembler, and LLVM Clang and lld (gcc and GNU ld
won't work I'm afraid). But don't worry, I've added all of them to src/data.h
as a byte array, so you don't have to compile
these unless you really really want to (for that, just delete data.h before you run make).
On the other hand to compile the plugins, you'll have to have a cross-compiler, either LLVM CLang or GNU gcc (x86_64-elf-gcc,
aarch64-elf-gcc). The repo includes these as binaries too. To do the recompilation, just delete the src/plugins/*.plg
files
before running make.
Easyboot is Free and Open Source Software, licensed under the terms of GPL version 3 or (at your opinion) any later version. See the LICENSE file for details.
bzt