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csdvrx | 10 months ago
I was doing something similar for the entire OS a few years ago: cosmopolinux, a distribution of cosmopolitan binaries: https://github.com/csdvrx/cosmopolinux
My idea was to replace the WSL binaries to have a Linux distribution living on C:\, but that could also be booted baremetal if you didn't want to use Windows
I had to put together a multi stage init system for that: if you get the ISO, you can put in on a thumbdrive and boot it: https://gitlab.com/csdvrx/cosmopolinux
The only difference between them is the kernel and the filesystem: the github NTFS has a firecracker linux kernel, the gitlab ISO has a regular kernel with many modules.
I wanted to do a full NTFS solution but I couldn't find a bootloader I liked that would support booting from a NTFS partition.
Booting from an ISO was simpler and faster.
yjftsjthsd-h|10 months ago
Could you stick the Linux kernel and initramfs on the EFI boot partition as a UKI, and then just tell it about its rootfs being on the NTFS C drive? You don't really need any bootloader except the firmware's UEFI implementation on most modern PCs, and Linux supports NTFS.
csdvrx|10 months ago
I considered that, even if it would go against the idea of having everything inside the Windows partition. I'd rather have had a shim in the EFI, with the UKI in C:\
The difficulty was bitlocker: my approach was a UKI with a small kernel and a few binaries to open the bitlocker volume and kexec the bigger kernel.
I was also exploring how to mark part of the NTFS volume as unusable to stick a different payload there.
The "ISO on a thumbdrive" was done to get baremetal boot working and out of the way, to see if I needed deeper changes to what had started as a 2 stages boot process, or if it was good enough as-as.
> Linux supports NTFS.
The kernel module is great!
I wish there was a linux distribution that could be run from either WSL or baremetal, to get more people familiar with baremetal linux.