Booting a Self-signed Linux Kernel

Now that The Linux Foundation is a member of the UEFI.org group, I’ve been working on the procedures for how to boot a self-signed Linux kernel on a platform so that you do not have to rely on any external signing authority.

After digging through the documentation out there, it turns out to be relatively simple in the end, so here’s a recipe for how I did this, and how you can duplicate it yourself on your own machine.

The first two options here enable EFI mode, and tell the kernel to build itself as a EFI binary that can be run directly from the UEFI bios. This means that no bootloader is involved at all in the system, the UEFI bios just boots the kernel, no “intermediate” step needed at all. As much as I love gummiboot, if you trust the kernel image you are running is “correct”, this is the simplest way to boot a signed kernel.

SOURCE: kroah.com