LinuxBoot Continues Maturing - Now Able To Boot Windows

LinuxBoot is approaching two years of age as the effort led by Facebook and others for replacing some elements of the system firmware with the Linux kernel.

Chris Koch of Google presented at last month's Platform Security Summit 2019 on the initiative. The Platform Security Summit 2019 took place at the start of October at Microsoft's facilities in Redmond. LinuxBoot in recent months has been able to begin booting Windows 10, which is related to the recent reports on kexec'ing Windows from Linux. But not only is Windows booting but VMware and Xen are also now working in a LinuxBoot environment.

Being developed in conjunction with LinuxBoot is U-Root as a Go-written userland for Linux boot-loaders with a Busybox-like set of tools. U-Root contains the former systemboot with the likes of Facebook and Google jointly working to deduplicate some of the related efforts.

The Platform Security Summit presentation video recording is now available and embedded above for your enjoyment. Going along with that is also the slide deck (PDF).