limine VS edk2

I assume this person meant to say `Limine'.

It's what I use for dualbooting Windows and Linux. It's really easy to Install, Use & Understand.

https://limine-bootloader.org/

They also publish a PHILOSOPHY.md page in their MS-source-git (github) that is, which is clearly offensive to us and many linux users:

I'm using Limine for bootloader, and in its documentation, in the Protocol page, we have:

Hello! While reading the Limine protocol specification i noticed that it says that "all non-usable entries (including kernel/modules) are not guaranteed any alignment, nor is it guaranteed that they do not overlap other entries". How am I supposed to get the memory size then? If the memory map entries can overlap, then summing their lengths won't work. Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.

That's the Limine bootloader

It's way easier to use a pre-existing bootloader. I recommend Limine. It has it's own boot protocol that's designed for x86_64. You don't need any additional setup as it's already booted to long mode unlike Multiboot which needs you to switch to long mode since it's booted in protected mode. You can find an example kernel here.

It uses Limine as the Bootloader but I used Ponchos OS Dev Playlist as a base.

For the modern server/desktop and even laptop, that's also no bad thing. It is somewhat ridiculous that UEFI bioses, internally, still boot in 16-bit real mode and have to do all the steps your bios bootloader used to do to set up a 64-bit environment ready to go: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/edc6681206c1a8791981a..., https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/edc6681206c1a8791981a..., https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/edc6681206c1a8791981a...

Why not just start the CPU in "long mode", which is what everyone is using it for, in the first place?

These newer ARM processors support 32-bit code at EL0 only (userspace). That seems like a reasonable approach for x86 as well and the freebsd announcement has this to say:

> There is currently no plan to remove support for 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels.

So for the moment, you can run 32-bit applications just fine.

Download this UEFI shell and place it in the BOOT subfolder

They could have at least informed TianoCore. the affected code in edk2 hasn't been modified in 2 years.... https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePkg/Library/BaseBmpSupportLib/BmpSupportLib.c

I have half fixed it.. Using this solution: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/discussions/4662

You need only EDK2 and some lööps.

What is the difference between this and https://github.com/tianocore/edk2

From there you'll need to get an EFI Shell. There may be one built into your system, but you can also get one here from Tianocore (aka, the people mostly making UEFI). Neither this EFI Shell nor Keytool.efi (the thing you need to load the keys) are signed of course, so you will need to turn off SecureBoot to continue. From there just run Keytool with your new keys, turn back on SecureBoot, and move on with your life.

I had the same issue. What fixed it for me was compiling my own OVMF.fd file from here and using that to boot. The version of OVMF that shipped with fedora was broken for me for some reason.