News and announcements

Kernelstub 2.0.6 Stable Released

Written for kernelstub by Ian Santopietro on 2018-02-14

It's with great pleasure that I'm announcing the release of Kernelstub 2.0.6 stable, which is the first stable release in the 2.x series. This version has been completely rewritten with object-oriented paradigms; sadly, kernelstub is no longer a 350-line python script. On the bright side, it's much more reliable thanks to the better tracking/organization of data, removal of a lot of embedded bash, and removal of the (highly faulty) kernel version detection code (which was just a hackish embedded `ls` command.

This new version was prompted by kernelstub being picked up as the default kernel/initrd manager for Pop_OS, which has also made it much easier to work on it. As a nice result, kernelstub can now act as dumb manager for other bootloaders which rely on the kernel and initrd living on the ESP (like systemd-boot) as well as continuing to support direct installation of the kernel stub loader into the NVRAM. You can even set up both at once, which makes systemd-boot a great choice as a backup bootloader.