KBoot is a general-purpose boot loader, which supports both BIOS- and UEFI-based PCs.
A short feature overview:
- Text and GUI menu interfaces
- Interactive shell
- Serial console support
- Ext2/3/4, FAT and ISO9660 filesystem support
- MBR and GPT partition support
- PXE network booting
- Linux and Multiboot OS loaders
- BIOS and EFI chain loaders (for booting OSes not natively supported, e.g. Windows)
- Custom boot protocol targeting hobby OS projects
KBoot also supports use as a second-stage boot loader on additional platforms, where its purpose is only to be able to load a kernel which uses the KBoot boot protocol. The platforms which support this are:
- QEMU ARM64 virt machine
- Raspberry Pi 3 & 4 (ARM64)
Current limitations:
- No FAT boot sector - cannot boot directly from a FAT filesystem on legacy BIOS systems.
- Floppy drives are not supported on BIOS systems.
- UEFI installation to disk on Macs is not supported (legacy BIOS, i.e. Boot Camp, is OK).
User documentation is available here.
Issues can be reported via the GitHub issue tracker.
KBoot is licensed under the terms of the ISC license.
KBoot is primarily authored by Alex Smith. Other major contributors include:
- froggey - parts of ARM64 support, bug fixes.