Linux booting process

Operating Systems

The Linux booting process is a sequence of stages that starts a Linux system. It resembles BSD and other Unix-style boot processes. Its four steps are system startup, the bootloader stage, the kernel stage and the init process. Firmware initializes the system, bootloaders load the kernel image, and the init process begins user-space initialization. Bootloaders and startup systems can vary, including GRUB, systemd-boot, systemd and runit.

Stages: System startup, bootloader stage, kernel stage and init process
Kernel loading: The second-stage bootloader loads the kernel image into memory
Startup alternatives: Traditional init-style scripts, systemd or runit

Sources and credits

Article: Booting process of Linux (English Wikipedia)
Wikidata: Q1068500
Text: Card text is adapted from the English Wikipedia article by an automated summary. Wikipedia content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for its contributors. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Article history and contributors
Illustration: By Paowee. GPLv2 · File page on Wikimedia Commons
Paowee, Own work. Taken from a VM running Debian Bookworm 12, booting in recovery, to initiate verbose mode.
Modifications: Resized and converted to WebP
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