OSDev.org

Dear Xenos1!

I've seen you've added a new page to the wiki.

This is fine, but please do not put links everywhere on the wiki. (I've seen you put your links where there was a BOOTBOOT link. Please note that BOOTBOOT is a stable, fully specified and very well documented protocol, is developed for more than 5 years now, has been tested on all VMs and on more than 100 real machines, and it provides features that wiki readers might be interested in, like multiple platform support as well as booting from many different media.) ATM your project offers no more features than any other hobby boot loaders really. Don't get me wrong, this loader looks interesting and promising and there will be a time when it will worth offering to the wiki readers, but that time hasn't arrived yet. Please be patient and wait for the time when it's not rapidly developed any more. Wait for a well-tested, well-documented, stable release before you recommend your loader to others! Thanks!

I'd also like to ask you to move your repo from github/osdev-wiki, because that name is confusing and suggests it's used by the OSDev community, when in reality it's not. You've already created a user for limine-bootloader, please use that to store your barebone example. Thanks! (This would be also better for your users as they could find the example next to the loader).

Cheers,
bzt

Why are you publicly talking about them? If you have an issue, PM them. It has been in development 1 and a half years. That is fairly mature. Please, don't publicly talk about someone. Thank you!

nexos wrote:Why are you publicly talking about them? If you have an issue, PM them.

Because this also applies to other members who want to advertise their half-ready, unstable boot loaders (let's face it, we have many of those). And the wiki should matter to all of us.

nexos wrote:It has been in development 1 and a half years. That is fairly mature.

Check it's activity, the frequency and number of commits. It's rapidly developed. 4 releases just in the last week!

Cheers,
bzt

I see what your saying, but at least make it generic.

nexos wrote:I see what your saying, but at least make it generic.

Okay, true. Please let me rephrase.

Dear members,

Please don't put boot loader links everywhere on the wiki. It's perfectly fine to create a page for your loader if:
1. it is stable and well-tested (in VMs as well as on real machines)
2. it is well-documented (how to compile, how to install, machine state on kernel handover etc.)
3. offers something plus that other loaders don't
4. has features that wiki readers might be interested in (assuming it's Open Source and its license allows study)

Furthermore, I'd like to ask you not to use confusing repo names, which would suggest your work is done by the OSDev community. Always make it clear that it is YOUR work, don't mislead newcomers. OSDev community consist of many developers individually developing projects and helping each other, there's no common OSDev boot loader nor OS. Suggesting that is not correct.

Thank you very much!
bzt

Hello, bzt.

First off, regarding your concerns about the "osdev-wiki" GitHub username: this is not owned by myself. I do not own this username, but another user of Limine does, which was kind enough to make the example repository. I would take this up to him if it concerns you so much. Sorry, cannot do much about it other than not linking it around or forking his repository.

That said, I am not sure if your concern has any basis in reality as the name "osdev" is not trademarked, is it? If it is, I will make sure this other person will move the repo elsewhere, else, you might have to just live with the fact the people can use the name "osdev" in other places without asking for explicit consent from osdev.org.

Now, onto the important stuff: Limine is younger than BOOTBOOT, that is true. The rapid release development does indeed indicate that bugs sneak in, perfectly fair. Whenever a release is made, I try to make sure in the most honest manner possible that there are no bugs as far as I am aware of, but as anyone knows, this is not always the case and there have been many instances of bugs (of which some pretty severe) being discovered after a release. Often by people other than myself. I try my best to fix bugs within 24 hours from the time they are reported and that is often the case.

Limine does not aspire towards feature parity with BOOTBOOT (which is a really good project, congratulations on that), but rather it is something which stems from a need I had myself, and it also happens to be the need of many other people that have decided to try it for their projects (including the fairly major skiftOS and managarm). Plus we natively support ext2/3/4 which as far as I can tell BOOTBOOT does not. Correct me if I'm wrong.

With the above said, I naively thought it would be in the best interest of this Wiki's readers to be given more choice, and since i saw BOOTBOOT's "what links here" page mentioning it around, I thought that would be something equally fine for me to do, at least anywhere BOOTBOOT was also mentioned

I had not seen any requirement of maturity of a project for it to be mentioned, and I thought that since Limine is a fairly used (and I might add, tested on MANY, MANY machines; as of November 2020 I have not received reports of it not being able to boot somewhere in many, many months) bootloader, it would not be an issue to mention it alongside your great project.

Also worth noting that maturity does not necessarily mean featurefulness, Limine's goal was never to support UEFI, coreboot, and many other platforms. It was always intended as a KISS BIOS bootloader supporting the stivale protocol (which is implemented by other bootloaders for a variety of platforms such as UEFI and even ARM).

Limine is still pre-1.0, you're right. To conclude this lengthy post, I do not want to start an edit war with you, bzt. I really want to believe you're removing mentions to my project taking everyone's best interest at heart when it comes to using popular, well tested, bootloaders; and that you didn't actually do it to "remove the competition" or anything like that.

I will add Limine back to the wiki, in the future, once a 1.0 is released and once I feel like there haven't been many bugs discovered for a long amount of time, since this is in the best interest of this Wiki's readers; and perhaps once I make that Limine article no longer a glorified stub :p

I hope that will be fine, by then, right bzt?

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

bzt wrote:

nexos wrote:I see what your saying, but at least make it generic.

Okay, true. Please let me rephrase.

Dear members,

Please don't put boot loader links everywhere on the wiki. It's perfectly fine to create a page for your loader if:
1. it is stable and well-tested (in VMs as well as on real machines)
2. it is well-documented (how to compile, how to install, machine state on kernel handover etc.)
3. offers something plus that other loaders don't
4. has features that wiki readers might be interested in (assuming it's Open Source and its license allows study)

Furthermore, I'd like to ask you not to use confusing repo names, which would suggest your work is done by the OSDev community. Always make it clear that it is YOUR work, don't mislead newcomers. OSDev community consist of many developers individually developing projects and helping each other, there's no common OSDev boot loader nor OS. Suggesting that is not correct.

Thank you very much!
bzt

I dont want to jump in for the kill on a little internet beef but in my honest opinion, after looking at the project, it checks basically all the checkboxes you put. I dont want to put on a tinfoil hat or accuse anyone of anything but in a bubble this removal of limine from the wiki sounds more like an attempt to remove direct competition for BOOTBOOT than actually a move to improve the quality of the community's documentation and resources, from someone who cares more about their own personal success than the quality of our tooling.
Besides, when someone makes such a change and feels the need to justify it on a forum thread maybe they feel like it wasn't that fair themselves

I personally think Limine is a great bootloader. It ran perfectly on my x86_64 BIOS desktop. I would use it for my OS, if it wasn't for the fact what I really wanted my OS to run on my UEFI laptop. Removing it from the Wiki seems like an overkill. I do sort of wish it had UEFI support, however.

Thank you for your answer!

xenos1 wrote:That said, I am not sure if your concern has any basis in reality as the name "osdev" is not trademarked, is it?

Of course not, if it were, then I wasn't asking nicely, instead you would face with an armada of angry lawyers But since OSDev is just a community, I'd like to ask you to be understanding and please do not to use the name.

xenos1 wrote:Limine does not aspire towards feature parity with BOOTBOOT

That was never a question. Please leave out BOOTBOOT from this conversation, that has nothing to do why I created this post. The point is, we have lots and lots and lots of boot loaders that aims at x86 only and can boot only from disks. There's absolutely no problem with that. But those that have a wiki page too, has something more to offer in the hope that they will be useful to the wiki readers. For example, babystep is the bare minimum; Bootf demonstrates how to load a higher-half kernel among other things; BootProg is interesting because it parses MZ executables (not discussed on the wiki otherwise); Gujin also supports CDROMs etc. etc. etc. As you can see they all have a feature that others don't, which makes them good examples. I'm pretty sure Limine also has some features that makes it unique, so I think it should have it's own wiki page, no question about that. FYI the wiki page wasn't removed, only the links (many of them I'd like to see put back as soon as you have a 1.0 stable release)

xenos1 wrote:rather it is something which stems from a need I had myself

Exactly, and those needs are very similar to other bootloaders, and specific to your kernel. Please don't get this wrong, I do not want to belittle your loader in any way. (I think a boot loader shouldn't be featureful, I think it should do one thing and one thing only, but do that good. That's also why I don't like GRUB, it's too bloated and more like an OS than a loader to my taste)

xenos1 wrote:it also happens to be the need of many other people that have decided to try it for their projects (including the fairly major skiftOS and managarm).

Which is really an achivement. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not against having a wiki page for Limine. I'm not against having links to that page on the wiki once it gets a stable release, just please do not put it everywhere. It would be the best if it were linked on the pages that are unique features to it. For example if Limine can boot from an ext4 partitions, which other loader's can't do (they usually only support ext2), then I think the "ext4" wiki page should have a link to Limine, because it is a good example which we don't have yet.

xenos1 wrote:Plus we natively support ext2/3/4 which as far as I can tell BOOTBOOT does not. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually BOOTBOOT can boot from any file system (ext family included). But the point is, it is not a main feature (because ESP needs to be FAT anyway) plus many loaders can boot from ext2, therefore on the "ext2" page you won't find any BOOTBOOT link.

Similarly, although BOOTBOOT supports Multiboot, it is not its main feature, therefore there's no link to it on the Multiboot page (because people looking for Multiboot are probably more interested in GRUB). But for example booting from unknown file system is one of its main features, therefore there's a link on the Rolling Your Own File System page (because people wanting to write their own file system might be interested in a loader that can boot from their fs) Does this make sense to you?

xenos1 wrote:With the above said, I naively thought it would be in the best interest of this Wiki's readers to be given more choice, and since i saw BOOTBOOT's "what links here" page mentioning it around, I thought that would be something equally fine for me to do, at least anywhere BOOTBOOT was also mentioned

There's nothing wrong with the first one, but there's a problem with the second one. Limine has different features than BOOTBOOT, so it is confusing and makes no sense to place links on the same pages.

For example, when Limine gets a stable release, I really would like to see a link to the Limine page on the GPT wiki page for example. But when there's no CDROM support in Limine, I don't think linking to it on the booting from CDROM page makes sense. You know what I mean?

xenos1 wrote:I had not seen any requirement of maturity of a project for it to be mentioned

Here is one now Actually that's the main reason for this thread, to regulate this somehow. Don't take this personal, it's just we have way too many x86 and disk only boot loaders around. You were just unlucky that this popped up at your loader, that's all.

xenos1 wrote:It was always intended as a KISS BIOS bootloader supporting the stivale protocol (which is implemented by other bootloaders for a variety of platforms such as UEFI and even ARM).

Which makes is a perfect example, and therefore Limine should be linked from the "stivale" wiki page as an example implementation.

xenos1 wrote:I will add Limine back to the wiki, in the future, once a 1.0 is released

Perfect! And please put links only on the relevant feature pages. Just for the records, even in its current state Limine looks promising, and its wiki page was never removed. Only the links were (and only until it has a 1.0 release).

xenos1 wrote:perhaps once I make that Limine article no longer a glorified stub :p

I don't think that's necessary, however preferable. I'm really looking forward for a more detailed wiki page! I hope we can remove the "stub" warning soon!

Cheers,
bzt

nexos wrote:Removing it from the Wiki seems like an overkill.

It was not removed, and nobody suggested it should be removed. The topic is about not to put links everywhere and to non-stable loaders.

Cheers,
bzt

It is in my opinion that the goal of the wiki is to serve as well, a wiki. It is supposed to be a collection of knowledge where beginners and experienced members alike can have access to resources both new and old to advanced their learning and their projects. Limine is, in my view, an amazing utility. It has support for the stivale protocol, which loads kernels into higher half 64 bit long mode and gives a sizeable mapping to allow the kernel to bootstrap the rest of memory on it's own. It supports multiple filesystems, has a nice boot menu, and is more configurable than I will ever need it to be. You brought up how limine has had 4 releases in the past week and is under constant development, but I honestly cannot bring myself to see how that is a bad thing. I greatly prefer projects that are under active development, because that means the developers are constantly thinking of ways to innovate, implementing different features, and fixing bugs that appear along the way. It means the project is alive and constantly taking suggestions from the community. The amount of releases may make people think that the project is immature, however it's precisely the opposite of that. The core parts of limine -- the elf loading, the stivale protocol implementation, the far32, ext2, and echfs filesystem drivers, etc -- have been stable for several months now. It is just that the developers are adding new things to make limine cater to a wider audience. That is not bad, that is innovation, and that is what I value in projects like limine and BOOTBOOT.

None of this is to detract from BOOTBOOT at all. I believe BOOTBOOT is an equally remarkable project and I respect the effort you've put into it these past 5 years, but I do not believe that we as members of this community have the right to remove projects from the wiki based on concerns that simply aren't valid. Such actions only detract from the effectiveness of the wiki, which at its core, is supposed to serve as a repository for information.

Thanks,
qoob

bzt wrote:Thank you for your answer!

You're very welcome

bzt wrote:Of course not, if it were, then I wasn't asking nicely, instead you would face with an armada of angry lawyers But since OSDev is just a community, I'd like to ask you to be understanding and please do not to use the name.

Once again, I do not own that particular GitHub organisation, I really do not know how else to put this.

bzt wrote:That was never a question. Please leave out BOOTBOOT from this conversation, that has nothing to do why I created this post. The point is, we have lots and lots and lots of boot loaders that aims at x86 only and can boot only from disks. There's absolutely no problem with that. But those that have a wiki page too, has something more to offer in the hope that they will be useful to the wiki readers. For example, babystep is the bare minimum; Bootf demonstrates how to load a higher-half kernel among other things; BootProg is interesting because it parses MZ executables (not discussed on the wiki otherwise); Gujin also supports CDROMs etc. etc. etc. As you can see they all have a feature that others don't, which makes them good examples. I'm pretty sure Limine also has some features that makes it unique, so I think it should have it's own wiki page, no question about that.

This point is very reasonable, there just wasn't any written rule in regards to any of this as of the time I added Limine to the Wiki, so how could I have possible known all this?

bzt wrote:FYI the wiki page wasn't removed, only the links (many of them I'd like to see put back as soon as you have a 1.0 stable release)

I am and was aware of that.

bzt wrote:

xenos1 wrote:Plus we natively support ext2/3/4 which as far as I can tell BOOTBOOT does not. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually BOOTBOOT can boot from any file system (ext family included). But the point is, it is not a main feature (because ESP needs to be FAT anyway) plus many loaders can boot from ext2, therefore on the "ext2" page you won't find any BOOTBOOT link.

Nit pick: emphasis on natively. BOOTBOOT does not support the ext family natively with a proper driver. Not to belittle BOOTBOOT in any way, but you misunderstood me :p

bzt wrote:Similarly, although BOOTBOOT supports Multiboot, it is not its main feature, therefore there's no link to it on the Multiboot page (because people looking for Multiboot are probably more interested in GRUB). But for example booting from unknown file system is one of its main features, therefore there's a link on the Rolling Your Own File System page (because people wanting to write their own file system might be interested in a loader that can boot from their fs) Does this make sense to you?

Yes, but here's also noting that regardless of how much I agree with you (I do), you have reverted 4 edits of mine where I added Limine to the Wiki. Of these 4 reverts, exactly 0 (zero) fit the criteria upon which we're agreeing.

It's fine if you want to remove Limine because it is pre-1.0, and I agree with you on that one as well, but this rant about Limine having been added to places where it does not belong seems out of place.

Limine has been removed from the following articles:

Rolling your own bootloader
Does not fit the criteria you just defined, but it sports a link to BOOTBOOT (and only BOOTBOOT). Why? Why is BOOTBOOT relevant there? If it is relevant, then surely Limine must be too, and so must be many other bootloaders! So perhaps changing that to a link to a list of bootloaders would be wiser. Point being, BOOTBOOT does not offer anything special to "Rolling your own bootloader" either.

GRUB
See above.

Bare Bones
See above.

GPT
You're even agreeing that it should be here, so this only counts as removed due to Limine being pre-1.0.

bzt wrote:For example, when Limine gets a stable release, I really would like to see a link to the Limine page on the GPT wiki page for example. But when there's no CDROM support in Limine, I don't think linking to it on the booting from CDROM page makes sense. You know what I mean?

This example is nonsensical because I have not put Limine on the CD-ROM page or any other page talking about unrelated matters.

You can blame me for having put Limine where it does not offer anything special - criticism taken (even though as shown in the previous point I made, BOOTBOOT is there too) - and I even agree with you; but I have not put Limine under the CD-ROM page, nor any other completely unrelated page, as shown in the Wiki's history.

So no, I do not know what you mean here.

bzt wrote:

xenos1 wrote:It was always intended as a KISS BIOS bootloader supporting the stivale protocol (which is implemented by other bootloaders for a variety of platforms such as UEFI and even ARM).

Which makes is a perfect example, and therefore Limine should be linked from the "stivale" wiki page as an example implementation.

I was thinking about working on a proper stivale page, so yeah, look forward to that one!

bzt wrote:Perfect! And please put links only on the relevant feature pages.

You too

bzt wrote:Just for the records, even in its current state Limine looks promising, and its wiki page was never removed. Only the links were (and only until it has a 1.0 release).

Thanks, bzt, we appreciate.

qoob wrote:You brought up how limine has had 4 releases in the past week and is under constant development, but I honestly cannot bring myself to see how that is a bad thing.

If it's listed with stable projects, newcomers might think it's stable too. Despite being rapidly changing, they start to use it, and then one of the updates might render their kernel incompatible, and they will became angry that this sh*t loader doesn't work. Nobody wants that. Therefore advertising projects that are unstable and under rapid development is not a good thing. Wait until it reaches some stability. @xenos1 understands that.

qoob wrote:I do not believe that we as members of this community have the right to remove projects from the wiki

Once again, the project was never removed from the wiki, and nobody suggested it should be removed. By the way I agree with you, many of my previous projects has been removed from the wiki by a certain member (the first version of my loader as well as my file system spec among others), so I understand how you feel about that.

xenos1 wrote:Once again, I do not own that particular GitHub organisation, I really do not know how else to put this.

You have put the link to it on the wiki. You could clone that repo under limine-loader's user and point the link to that instead without probs. You've also said that it was made by a Limine developer, which means you must have his contact, and you can ask him and proxy the query to him.

xenos1 wrote:This point is very reasonable, there just wasn't any written rule in regards to any of this as of the time I added Limine to the Wiki, so how could I have possible known all this?

Obviously you couldn't have known, that's why we're discussing this topic

xenos1 wrote:Yes, but here's also noting that regardless of how much I agree with you (I do), you have reverted 4 edits of mine where I added Limine to the Wiki. Of these 4 reverts, exactly 0 (zero) fit the criteria upon which we're agreeing.

I've only removed links, and I've put description in the reverts explaining they are only because there's no stable release yet. I'm expecting you to put your links back as soon as you have a 1.0 release.

xenos1 wrote:It's fine if you want to remove Limine because it is pre-1.0, and I agree with you on that one as well, but this rant about Limine having been added to places where it does not belong seems out of place.

You've said it yourself, "would be something equally fine for me to do, at least anywhere BOOTBOOT was also mentioned". And I say do not do that. Instead think about what makes your loader special, and put links on those pages instead. It will help the wiki readers more to find a suitable loader for their needs.

xenos1 wrote:This example is nonsensical because I have not put Limine on the CD-ROM page or any other page talking about unrelated matters.

I know, it was a deliberate choice of an example to help your understanding. I was trying to say it shouldn't be linked there. Just as with the "ext4" example I was trying to say it should be linked there. Look, I don't want to tell you what are the strong features of Limine. It's your project, you should know that.

xenos1 wrote:Thanks, bzt, we appreciate.

And I would like to thank your constructive attitude. I'm glad you understood that (despite some wanted to suggest otherwise) this is not against Limine, it's only about providing quality content on the wiki.

Cheers,
bzt

bzt wrote:Therefore advertising projects that are unstable and under rapid development is not a good thing. Wait until it reaches some stability. @xenos1 understands that.

I think it is probably around beta stability. xenos1 said it had many tested on many different machines and it worked. It has been in development for 1 and a half years. Maybe on its wiki page xenos1 should put "Note that Limine is underneath rapid development, and is not stable yet. If use this loader in your OS and update it to a newer version, compatibility may be broken".

bzt wrote:Once again, the project was never removed from the wiki, and nobody suggested it should be removed. By the way I agree with you, many of my previous projects has been removed from the wiki by a certain member (the first version of my loader as well as my file system spec among others), so I understand how you feel about that.

When I first posted, I wasn't sure if you wanted it removed or not. Now I see you don't .

bzt wrote:

xenos1 wrote:Once again, I do not own that particular GitHub organisation, I really do not know how else to put this.

You have put the link to it on the wiki. You could clone that repo under limine-loader's user and point the link to that instead without probs. You've also said that it was made by a Limine developer, which means you must have his contact, and you can ask him and proxy the query to him.

Or maybe he could create another wiki barebones page for Limine?

bzt wrote:

xenos1 wrote:Thanks, bzt, we appreciate.

And I would like to thank your constructive attitude. I'm glad you understood that (despite some wanted to suggest otherwise) this is not against Limine, it's only about providing quality content on the wiki.

I hope you're not hinting that I am not being constructive, as I just wanted to make sure xenos1 didn't feel belittled and shamed. But I know that wasn't your intent .

xenos1 wrote:So perhaps changing that to a link to a list of bootloaders would be wiser.

That link was already there, but you made a valid point, so link modified.

nexos wrote:Maybe on its wiki page xenos1 should put "Note that Limine is underneath rapid development, and is not stable yet. If use this loader in your OS and update it to a newer version, compatibility may be broken".

Yes, that would be the best, I agree (besides finishing the loader and making a release of course).

nexos wrote:Or maybe he could create another wiki barebones page for Limine?

I don't think so. Wiki is not particularly good at storing complete source examples, because it's hard to download them. It's more for short code examples that people can copy'n'paste. I believe the best would be to put the repo next to the loader, and place a link to that on the wiki, as I've said.

nexos wrote:I hope you're not hinting that I am not being constructive

I have absolutely no idea why you might think that. I did not wanted to hint anything.

Cheers,
bzt