Limine

What is Limine?

Limine (pronounced as demonstrated here) is a modern, secure, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager, also used as the reference implementation for the Limine boot protocol.

Community, Support, and Donations

Donate

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!

Community

We have a Matrix room at #limine:matrix.org if you need support, info, or you just want to hang out with us.

Limine's boot menu

Photo by Levent Simsek

Supported architectures

• IA-32 (32-bit x86)
• x86-64
• aarch64 (arm64)
• riscv64
• loongarch64

Supported boot protocols

• Linux
• Limine
• Multiboot 1
• Multiboot 2
• Chainloading

Supported partitioning schemes

• MBR
• GPT
• Unpartitioned media

Supported filesystems

• FAT12/16/32
• ISO9660 (CDs/DVDs)

If your filesystem isn't listed here, please read the FAQ first, especially before opening issues or pull requests related to this.

Minimum system requirements

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.

Packaging status

All Limine releases since 7.x use Semantic Versioning for their naming.

Binary releases

For convenience, for point releases, binaries are distributed. These binaries are shipped as assets as part of the Limine GitHub releases (see the limine-binary-* files).

The limine host tool is shipped in highly portable source form as part of the binary release package. For most/all UNIX-like OSes, in order to rebuild it, simply run make in the unpacked binary release directory. Alternatively, it can be built stand-alone using any C99 compatible compiler.

limine host tool binaries for x86 Windows are provided as part of the binary release package.

Build and Install Instructions

The following steps are not necessary if using a binary release.

See INSTALL.md.

Usage

See USAGE.md.

3rd Party Software Acknowledgments

See 3RDPARTY.md.