Super fast boot on Linux with EFISTUB 🚀
Boot without an intermediate bootloader, with encryption and hibernation
August 10, 2021
Boot without an intermediate bootloader, with encryption and hibernation
August 10, 2021
My friend Damien was recently installing Arch Linux on a new rig, and while doing so he mentioned to me that he installed it without GRUB.
So I ask him what other bootloader he used, and he’s like, no, I didn’t
use a bootloader, just efibootmgr.
I didn’t know this was possible, so I looked into it and quickly found about EFISTUB.
EFISTUB allows “EFI firmware to load the kernel as an EFI executable”. It was introduced in Linux 3.3, released in 2012. I should have known about that before. 😅
As the wiki says a bit later:
UEFI is designed to remove the need for an intermediate bootloader such as GRUB. If your motherboard has a good UEFI implementation, it is possible to embed the kernel parameters within a UEFI boot entry and for the motherboard to boot Arch directly.
With efibootmgr, you can add an EFI boot entry that contains all the
parameters you need to properly boot the kernel, including in my case,
LUKS encryption and hibernation.
Here’s the command I used:
efibootmgr \
--disk /dev/sda \
--part 1 \
--create \
--label Linux \
--loader /vmlinuz-linux \
--unicode 'cryptdevice=/dev/sda2:luks:allow-discards root=/dev/vg0/root resume=/dev/vg0/swap rw initrd=\initramfs-linux.img'
Here, my EFI partition is /dev/sda1, and /dev/sda2 is a LUKS
encrypted partition that uses LVM to have a root and a swap volume.
The swap is used to suspend to disk (hibernate). This setup is explained
in more details in this post.
If your motherboard has a compliant EFI implementation, that’s all you should need to remove the need for an intermediate bootloader!
After rebooting, it worked flawlessly, and what stroke me was how fast
it was to boot! Definitely worth giving it a shot. Also don’t forget to
pacman -Rns grub if it works for you. 😛
Fun fact: this is so simple to do you can fit the previous command in a tweet!
TIL you can use Linux EFISTUB to boot without an intermediate bootloader (here with encryption and hibernation).
efibootmgr -d /dev/sda -p 1 -c -l /vmlinuz-linux -u 'cryptdevice=/dev/sda2:luks:allow-discards root=/dev/vg0/root resume=/dev/vg0/swap rw initrd=\initramfs-linux.img'