The Linux Foundation Member Summit 2025

In 2017, I gave a talk, "Replace your exploit-ridden firmware with a Linux kernel", describing the NERF project we had started at Google. NERF (Non-Extensible Reduced Firmware) replaced much of the proprietary, buggy, exploit-friendly UEFI firmware with a Linux kernel and user programs, written in Go, from the u-root project (u-root.org).

A lot has happened since that talk!

We renamed NERF to LinuxBoot, and set up a Linux Foundation project of that name. Google, Bytedance, and others have deployed LinuxBoot at global scale; it is no exaggeration to say that LinuxBoot is deployed on the better part of 10 million servers. The Go code in u-root continues to grow in capability, even as the Go compilers have gotten better, producing higher performance, higher quality, smaller code. We can also use Google's Go compiler or the TinyGo compiler, which uses an LLVM backend. The TinyGo compiler has been shown to produce code that is comparable in speed, footprint, and jitter to the best binary that Rust generates.

In this talk, I will review the core ideas of the LinuxBoot project; why we designed it that way; our deployment experience; and where we go from here.