Tag: u-root

SystemBoot: a LinuxBoot distro that works as a system firmware + bootloader, based on u-root

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

SystemBoot is a distribution for LinuxBoot to create a system firmware + bootloader. It is based on u-root. The provided programs are:
* netboot: a network boot client that uses DHCP and HTTP to get a boot program based on Linux, and uses kexec to run it
* localboot: a tool that finds bootable kernel configurations on the local disks and boots them
* uinit: a wrapper around netboot and localboot that just mimicks a BIOS/UEFI BDS behaviour, by looping between network booting and local booting. The name uinit is necessary to be picked up as boot program by u-root.

This work is similar to the pxeboot and boot commands that are already part of u-root, but approach and implementation are slightly different. Thanks to Chris Koch and Jean-Marie Verdun for pioneering in this area. This project started as a personal experiment under github.com/insomniacslk/systemboot but it is now an effort of a broader community and graduated to a real project for system firmwares.[…]

 

https://github.com/systemboot/systemboot

U-Root: firmware solution written in Go

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

From 2015, something I missed because I didn’t know Go then. ;-(

U-root: A Go-based, Firmware Embeddable Root File System with On-demand Compilation
Ronald G. Minnich, Google; Andrey Mirtchovski, Cisco

U-root is an embeddable root file system intended to be placed in a FLASH device as part of the firmware image, along with a Linux kernel. The program source code is installed in the root file system contained in the firmware FLASH part and compiled on demand. All the u-root utilities, roughly corresponding to standard Unix utilities, are written in Go, a modern, type-safe language with garbage collection and language-level support for concurrency and inter-process communication. Unlike most embedded root file systems, which consist largely of binaries, U-root has only five: an init program and 4 Go compiler binaries. When a program is first run, it and any not-yet-built packages it uses are compiled to a RAM-based file system. The first invocation of a program takes a fraction of a second, as it is compiled. Packages are only compiled once, so the slowest build is always the first one, on boot, which takes about 3 seconds. Subsequent invocations are very fast, usually a millisecond or so. U-root blurs the line between script-based distros such as Perl Linux and binary-based distros such as BusyBox; it has the flexibility of Perl Linux and the performance of BusyBox. Scripts and builtins are written in Go, not a shell scripting language. U-root is a new way to package and distribute file systems for embedded systems, and the use of Go promises a dramatic improvement in their security.

Video and audio on first URL.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc15/technical-session/presentation/minnich

https://github.com/u-root/u-root

http://u-root.tk/