this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The boot entries live in firmware yes, efibootmgr can create and remove them. The are pointers to the bootloader. Many systems can boot from the disk itself without the entry, the entry just makes it pretty (“Fedora” instead of NVME1).

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not exactly sure what you're suggesting. Isn't that more or less what I just said?

[–] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Somewhat. One, a system can be bootable without the entries because they are just pointers to the actual bootloader, so even if windows does the stupid and deletes them it isn’t the end of the world. It does depend on your specific firmware though.

Also two, you can write them again with a single line in efibootmgr, they’re just saying “if I click Fedora load the shim from the EFI system partition on disk 1”.

This is very different than the old world where windows would delete your bootloader entirely and the MBR couldn’t be easily explored. They live in the efi system partition instead - or at least the shim does- and typically every OS leaves the other ones alone (even Windows, except in this case, although it didn’t touch the shim itself).

The initial comment was about the bootloader and really only applies to MBR partitions.