# Frequently Asked Questions

### Why not support filesystem X or feature Y? (eg: LUKS, LVM)

The idea with Limine is to remove the responsibility of parsing filesystems and
formats, aside from the bare minimum necessities (eg: FAT*, ISO9660), from the
bootloader itself. It is a needless duplication of efforts to have bootloaders
support all possible filesystems and formats, and it leads to massive, bloated
bootloaders as a result (eg: GRUB2).

What is needed is to simply make sure the bootloader is capable of reading its
own files, configuration, and be able to load kernel/module files from disk.
The kernel should be responsible for parsing everything else as it sees fit.

### What about LUKS? What about security? Encrypt the kernel!

Simply put, this is unnecessary. Putting the kernel/modules in a readable FAT32
partition and letting Limine know about their BLAKE2B checksums in the config
file provides as much security as encrypting the kernel does.

### What if a malicious actor modifies the config file?

While this is a pointless effort on legacy x86 BIOS, it is a reasonable
expectation to secure the boot sequence on UEFI systems with Secure Boot.
Limine provides a way to modify its own EFI executable to bake in the BLAKE2B
checksum of the config file itself. The EFI executable can then get signed with
a key added to the firmware's keychain. This prevents modifications to the
config file (and in turn the checksums contained there) from going unnoticed.

Additionally, when UEFI Secure Boot is active **and** a config checksum has
been enrolled, Limine enforces that all loaded files have BLAKE2B hashes in
their paths, and disables the config editor. Enrolling a checksum is the
explicit opt-in to this hardening; without one, Secure Boot enforcement is
not applied. See [USAGE.md](USAGE.md) for details.

### I do not want to have a separate FAT boot partition! What can I do?

It is `$year_following_2012` now and most PCs are equipped with UEFI and simply
won't boot without a FAT EFI system partition anyways.
It is not unreasonable to share the EFI system partition with the OS's /boot
and store kernels, initramfses, and any other files needed for boot there.
