[Solved] Where to put the vmlinuz and initramfs

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Nima0908 · Post by **Nima0908** » Mon Mar 02, 2026 8:51 pm

Hello,
for my new gentoo install i decided to switch to limine instead of grub and sadly ran into an issue which i cant seem to fix (to my liking atleast). The problem is that for it to boot i (obviously) need limine to have access to vmlinuz and the initramfs, but they sit in my /boot on my root partition while limine (obviously) sits on the efi partition. That means that while booting, limine doesnt have access to it. My sollution till now was to copy everything over to a subdir /boot inside the EFI dir so limine has access which works, but iam really unhappy with the sollution as iam pretty sure there are better ones. Does anyone know how i could do that better? Thanks for your time and answers

Post by **pietinger** » Mon Mar 02, 2026 9:33 pm

If limine (which I dont know) needs the kernel (and initramfs) in the ESP (because it is not able to access the root partition) then I guess the easiest solution is to go back to a solution we had in the past: Mount your ESP to /boot (instead /efi).

See more here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1 ... ight-.html
(I mean the solution 1 we had as default in our Handbook)

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Mon Mar 02, 2026 9:38 pm

Nima0908,

It's a feature, not a bug. The limine home page say that it only supports vfat and iso9660.
You cannot install linux to a vfat partition and iso9660 is read only.

If you want to use limine, all the files it needs to read must be on the ESP (which must be vfat,) somewhere.

pingtoo · Post by **pingtoo** » Mon Mar 02, 2026 9:47 pm

I am interesting on all thing boot, so I did a quick look on PHILOSOPHY.md. Apparently limine take a strong stand on NOT support additional file system beside FAT and your rootfs I presume is not FAT based filesystem, that mean limine will not able to follow some forms of path logic to find any files.

In theory it is possible to use UEFI simple access logic but I don't see any support in limine config file on how to specify UEFI PCI based offset.

alternative you can use chain-loading to another boot loader (grub for example) then have this third boot loader to load kernel/initramfs. I choose grub as example because I know how to create a standalone fixed configuration so it will go straight to load kernel without prompt.

Nima0908 · Post by **Nima0908** » Mon Mar 02, 2026 9:57 pm

Thanks for all your answers. I guess ill go back to using /boot then.