Gummiboot Gains PE File Searching Support To Find Linux Kernels

The Gummiboot simple UEFI boot manager hasn't seen much improvements in recent months but on Friday received a new feature over the course of several hundred new lines of code.

The work done by Kay Sievers, known for his systemd contributions, allows Gummiboot to find Linux kernels with an embedded os-release file. Kay explained in his commit message, "Look for EFI executables at /EFI/Linux/*.efi, and add them to the menu if the PE file contains an .osrel section which carries an os-release file with the expected information."

PE is short for the Portable Executable file format used by Windows and other operating systems, which is also the standard file format used for EFI booting. Up to now Gummiboot didn't support PE file parsing and this change should make it easier for Gummiboot to find bootable Linux kernels in some cases.

This change should be found in Gummiboot 46. The Gummiboot 45 release happened last May and since then there's only been four commits -- including Friday's work by Kay -- to this simple EFI boot loader. The other Gummiboot 46 changes so far are just forcing a screen clear when entering the menu, a build system change, and a fix for freeing of a wrong variable. For those that have forgotten about the existence of Gummiboot (or haven't heard of it in the first place), visit its FreeDesktop.org project site to learn more.