Moderator: BarryK
mintsuki has relented, see discussion on github:
https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/issues/386
@tosim
We have you to thank. It was your difficulty that lead to my request in the Limine bootloader issues.
I will bring out another release of EasyOS soon with the latest v7 Limine.
if you have read the above, and are unfamiliar with Limine, here are links to earlier discussions:
"Limine Bootloader"
viewtopic.php?t=8634
"Limine Bootloader"
viewtopic.php?t=6190
"How to configure Limine to boot EasyOS"
viewtopic.php?t=9933
"easyos can't boot with 7.x"
viewtopic.php?t=11680
In a nutshell, Limine is a bootloader that is much simpler to use than grub2.
It is suitable for any Linux distro, not just EasyOS. Can boot Windows also.
Limine, up until v5, supports fat12/16/32 and ext2/3/4, no other filesystems.
The developer mintsuki has an ideology to keep Limine very simple, and she considered that the kernel vmlinuz and initrd could be in a fat partition, so could drop support for ext2/3/4.
The problem with that is EasyOS separates the bootloader and the OS, with the latter including vmlinuz and initrd being in a ext4 partition. Which is also how many other Linux distributions install.
So when mintsuki decided to drop support for ext4 in Limine v6 late last year, it left us stuck on using v5.
With upcoming 7.12.0 she has relented, but with the understanding that ext is experimental and unsupported. That means, if we do encounter any problem with ext4 then we should take it onboard to find the cause ourselves and present a solution, as a patch, to mintsuki. And not trouble her by reporting a fault.
Though, there are no problems with ext4 in the EasyOS usb stick.
Regarding the "Cannot enable A20 line", this is an ancient problem that goes right back to the IBM PC in 1981:
"A20 - a pain from the past"
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/A20.html
Hooray! I'm using Limine on Kirkstone right now, and it's fast and trouble-free. Glad to hear it's probably sticking around for future EasyOS versions!
