Limine (pronounced as demonstrated here) is a modern, advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager, also used as the reference implementation for the Limine boot protocol.
If you want to support the work I (@mintsuki) do on Limine, feel free to donate to me on Liberapay:
Donations welcome, but absolutely not mandatory!
We have a Matrix room at #limine:matrix.org (preferred), and a Discord server if you need support, info, or you just want to hang out with us.
- IA-32 (32-bit x86)
- x86-64
- aarch64 (arm64)
- riscv64
- loongarch64
- Linux
- Limine
- Multiboot 1
- Multiboot 2
- Chainloading
- MBR
- GPT
- Unpartitioned media
- FAT12/16/32
- ISO9660 (CDs/DVDs)
- ext2/3/4 (NOTE: This is experimental and not supported. Maintainers wanted!)
If your filesystem isn't listed here, please read the philosophy first, especially before opening issues or pull requests related to this.
For 32-bit x86 systems, support is only ensured starting with those with Pentium Pro (i686) class CPUs.
All x86-64, aarch64, riscv64 and loongarch64 (UEFI) systems are supported.
All Limine releases since 7.x use Semantic Versioning for their naming.
For convenience, for point releases, binaries are distributed. These binaries
are shipped in the -binary branches and tags of this repository
(see branches and
tags).
For example, to clone the latest binary release of the 8.x branch, one can do:
git clone https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine.git --branch=v8.x-binary --depth=1or, to clone a specific binary point release (for example 8.6.0):
git clone https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine.git --branch=v8.6.0-binary --depth=1In order to rebuild host utilities like limine, simply run make in the binary
release directory.
Host utility binaries are provided for Windows.
The following steps are not necessary if cloning a binary release. If so, skip to "Installing Limine binaries".
In order to build Limine, the following programs have to be installed:
common UNIX tools (also known as coreutils),
GNU make, grep, sed, find, awk, gzip, nasm, mtools
(optional, necessary to build limine-uefi-cd.bin).
Furthermore, gcc or llvm/clang must also be installed, alongside
the respective binutils.
If using a release tarball (recommended, see https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/releases),
run ./configure directly.
If checking out from the repository, run ./bootstrap first in order to download the
necessary dependencies and generate the configure script (GNU autoconf required).
./configure takes arguments and environment variables; for more information on
these, run ./configure --help.
./configure by default does not build any Limine port. Make sure to read the
output of ./configure --help and enable any or all ports!
Limine supports both in-tree and out-of-tree builds. Simply run the configure
script from the directory you wish to execute the build in. The following make
commands are supposed to be run inside the build directory.
To build Limine, run:
make # (or gmake where applicable)This step will install Limine files to share, include, and
bin directories in the specified prefix (default is /usr/local, see
./configure --help, or the PREFIX variable if installing from a binary release).
To install Limine, run:
make install # (or gmake where applicable)See USAGE.md.
Limine uses a stripped-down version of tinf for GZIP decompression in early x86 BIOS stages.
Limine uses stb_image for wallpaper image loading.
Limine uses libfdt for manipulating FDTs.