Fedora to move to unified kernel in future.

[dos2unix]

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I have wondered in the past why nobody did this before. The downside is.. the kernel will be even bigger.
The upside, no more dracut/initrd. Instead of your system trying to figure out what hardware you have and load only
the modules you need everytime you install or update the system... just put it all in there and only use what you need.

Another possible downside to this is... since I'm now throwing everything into the pot, the kernel will be larger.
How much larger? I'm not sure, but large enough systems that do this could require more RAM to run.
(Fedora already ended 32-bit support)

The two major upsides... I don't have to compile an initrd image everytime I update the system, everything is already loaded.
This makes taking a hard drive on an installed system easier to move to another system. Theorectically I could
move a hard drive from a Ryzen/Radeon/Broadcom system to a Intel/GeForce/Realtek system without having to rebuild the initrd.
This would make portability between installed systems much easier. Currently live USB distro's get around this by rebuilding
the initrd on the fly every reboot.

The other thing is, external modules are (very slightly) slower than compiled in modules. Now we are talking thousandths of a
percent, not enough to really matter in most situations. This is controversial, and some articles say there is no lag, but some do.
But it adds up if you have a dozen external modules loaded, and are doing something like distributed computing across clusters.
So theoretically everything would be slightly faster.

My prediction is... this will be like wayland, systemd, pipewire, and podman. It starts off on this distro, other distro's watch to see
how it works, and then they adopt it. Mark my words, you heard it here first. All the other major distro's will start doing this also.

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[dos2unix]

It will be interesting to see how they implement BIOS/UEFI systems.
Or could this be the end of Legacy BIOS support?

Changes/Unified Kernel Support Phase 1 - Fedora Project Wiki

fedoraproject.org

 

[f33dm3bits]

Thanks for sharing!

A unified kernel image is an all-in-one EFI binary containing kernel, initrd, cmdline and signature.

I'm not sure what to think of this, now you have kernel, kernel-core and kernel-modules installed and you can see what version is installed. This raises a lot of questions in my mind, what is that supposed to look like when they put everything into one efi binary? How is that packaged, are you still able to see the version based on the packages installed? Are you able to have multiple efi binaries of different versions installed(just like you can see the kernels installed under /boot), for example still able to choose between different kernels to but when the grub menu shows? How does this effect Nvidia drivers and other drivers that are not part of the kernel but load as extra kernel modules?