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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

How soon before we can squeeze a basic Linux distro into UEFI?

I put a nearly full TinyCore Linux distribution (incl GUI and WiFi drivers) into the ROM of my Thinkpad X210 using Coreboot, fun little project.

I suppose a better question then is, why isn't this routinely done for factory firmware? It seems that such a distro would be immensely helpful for any kind of recovery. Not to mention that, if it has a web browser, it could be used in a pinch to get stuff done even on a machine with a failed SSD etc.

Lenovo has some form of what appears to be Linux on their newest laptops that can do internet based recovery of the OS. I haven't had time to play with it. It's been way too long coming - Apple devices can boot into a lightweight MacOS and do this and have been able to forever.

Monthly firmware servicing for a bajillion models (to maintain a level of security) isn't exactly something that the OEMs want to sign up for.

About a web browser, forget it with the current SPI flash sizing that vendors use on PCs. Those are way too small for that.

Asus used to ship it on their laptops,

https://www.rarst.net/software/asus-express-gate/

that's already possible

With the EFI stub in the Linux kernel and the ability to embed an initrd in the kernel, you can boot a small distribution with just the kernel file. The only issue is that it takes a long time to load a very large kernel into memory like that.

I tried that with a buildroot based hypervisor I created for my home lab.

I remember doing something similar, only using pxe to chain boot Linux from an HTTP server. iirc we used https://ipxe.org/

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