Inspired by UEFI, I want to skip the stage of the bootloader (grub, lilo, syslinux) and boot linux directly. Is this possible? Cant I just boot the kernel directly, or have a minimalistic bootloader that fits in the MBR?
Is there a way to boot linux directly from MBR?
boot;boot loader;mbr
The space available in the MBR itself is tiny. (About 400 bytes or something.) That's way too small to fit an entire filesystem driver. Without a filesystem driver, there's no way to figure out where on disk the kernel is stored, and hence you can't load the kernel.You could try hard-coding the location of the kernel into the MBR itself. But then if the file ever moves on disk (e.g., you defrag the disk), the system stops booting.EFI apparently includes a FAT driver, meaning you can put a bunch of files on a partition that's formatted with FAT and load executables from there. So you could maybe put the Linux kernel onto that somehow... I don't know enough about EFI to say much about it.