Linux 5.7 EFI Changes: "The GRUB Project Is Showing Signs Of Life Again"

Ingo Molnar on Monday began sending in his feature pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window. Of the pull requests worth noting are the EFI changes.

Molnar characterized the GRUB boot-loader project as "showing signs of life again" following the recent introduction of a generic Linux/UEFI boot protocol rather than "x86 specific hacks". The hope is that over time all new extensions will be introduced via that protocol to avoid these hacks for cleaning up the EFI kernel boot code in due course.

There is also prep work for RISC-V EFI support although not fully plumbed in time for making Linux 5.7. At least the prep work is in place and perhaps for Linux 5.8 will be the full RISC-V Linux EFI support.

EFI Changes for Linux 5.7 also include AArch64/ARM64 improvements, EFI stub cleanups, a generic initrd loading method using the system firmware, a new mixed mode boot method not relying on the x86 EFI handover protocol, UEFI v2.8A changes, and other work.

The complete list of Linux 5.7 EFI changes can be found via this pull request.