Petitboot is a platform independent bootloader based on the Linux kexec warm reboot mechanism. Petitboot supports loading kernel, initrd and device tree files from any Linux mountable filesystem, plus can load files from the network using the FTP, SFTP, TFTP, NFS, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. Petitboot can boot any operating system that includes kexec boot support.
Petitboot includes graphical and command line user interface programs. The command line programs can be used to boot the system remotely via telnet or ssh sessions. Multiple user interface programs can run simultaneously.
Petitboot is licensed under the GPLv2.
Screen Shots
| NCURSES UI Over Telnet | The TWIN GUI |
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| NCURSES UI in Portrait | The NCURSES Option Editor |
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Design & Features
Petitboot has a client-server design. The petitboot server, pb-discover, uses several event mechanisms to dynamically update its knowledge of available boot configurations as they become available or unavailable at run time. The petitboot client programs implement the petitboot user interfaces and display the curent boot configurations known by pb-discover.
Petitboot monitors udev block device events, and when a new block device becomes available to the system pb-discover will search for boot configuration files on the device. When a device is removed from the system pb-discover will remove any boot configurations associated with that device.
pb-discover exposes a generic event mechanism that allows utility programs to provide boot configuration information. Petitboot includes utility programs to process boot configuration info from DHCP servers, and if configured to do so, will manage any boot configuration info received.
Petitboot provides a programming framework for creating custom user interface programs.
Presentations
Using Petitboot
You can navigate the ncurses user interface with the keyboard arrow keys. A help and status menu is displayed at the lower part of the petitboot screen.
In the GUI client each discovered configuration source will appear as an icon on the left-hand pane of the screen. Boot options from the selected source will appear on the right.
Petitboot man pages:
Source Code
The current petitboot and twin windowing system sources can be found at kernel.org:
Distributions
Petitboot has some support in several Linux Distributions:
About
You can find the latest version of this document, and some other useful things here:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/petitboot/petitboot.html
Please send all comments and inquiries regarding petitboot to the petitboot mailing list: