Drop GRUB and use Limine by default #47
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This has already been discussed in Discord. In brief, the main motivation for it:
GRUB has no active maintenance, has very large security issues [1][2][3] that have been popping up in waves for the last few years. All this time we left it only as a fallback option and for systems with BIOS due to lack of alternatives. Now there is Limine, which generally works much better: it already has a good set of tools to work with in the form of limine-entry-tool/limine-mkinitcpio-hook, supports loading Btrfs snapshots, searching for other systems for dual-booting via limine-scan from limine-entry-tool, has a codebase 14 times smaller than GRUB.
The only advantage of GRUB that is still relevant is the ability to keep
/bootencrypted, since it is the only boot loader with ability to decrypt root partition itself without initramfs. That said, GRUB still doesn't have strong LUKS 2 support, and we have always used LUKS1 in calamares for GRUB. An alternative approach to hardening could be to use Secure Boot + checksum verification of kernel and initramfs files in Limine (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Limine#Configuration).The reason for changing the default from systemd-boot to Limine is simple - loading Btrfs snapshots is extremely useful for fast system recovery among ordinary users. Not everyone has the knowledge to figure out a breakdown, besides it is also time consuming to explain the solution to some breakdowns and issues, so a simple rollback from boot snapshot via Limine looks like the easiest and most reliable solution.
[1] - https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/02/18/3
[2] - https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2022-11/msg00059.html
[3] - https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2022-06/msg00035.html