I wrote a bootloader in Rust that boots Linux on IBM PowerVM — no C, no GRUB, no standard library. Just #![no_std] Rust talking directly to Open Firmware, parsing FAT and ISO9660, loading ELF kernels using UAPI BLS spec, and jumping to them with inline assembly. The hardest part? The firmware has a secret limit on memory allocations that nobody documents.
https://siliconislandblog.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/booting-with-rust-chapter-3/
@tris Someone pointed it out to me on linked in yes.
Not sure I see the value beyond it being in Rust, systemd-boot is 10k big and we have smaller things like
https://gitlab.com/CentOS/automotive/src/ukiboot
@aruiz nice! Sounds like what I did a while ago (booting FreeBSD with Rust on x86_64 UEFI) was easy mode.
Honestly most of the annoyance in that project was down to FreeBSD, it won't boot without very specific pagetable layouts and a kernel placed in a location that is both undocumented and not what one would expect based off the section headers.
James Waples
Alberto Ruiz
Timothée Ravier
Tris
artemist
javierm
Aelin