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Installation Location

kiOS is installed in two parts:

  • The EFI binary is installed to an EFI System Partition
  • Everything else is installed to a kiOS-specific Data Partition

Data Partition

Info

The most important location in the data partition is the etc directory which is found in datapart:/meta/etc but will be mounted to the standard location /etc during runtime. During the next installation steps, references to saving files in /etc/... should be taken to mean datapart:/meta/etc/...

kiOS requires a data partition for disk-backed storage. For general information about this partition, see its documentation.

If your disk is partitioned with GPT, it is recommended to set this partition's type to the following GUID so that kiOS can auto discover it:

97aac693-d920-465a-94fe-eb59fc86dfaa
What is this?

GPT Partitions have a "type" associated with them, which is identified via a globally unique identifier (GUID). kiOS's data partition's GUID is 97aac693-d920-465a-94fe-eb59fc86dfaa.

This partition should have an ext4 file system created with it.

Kernel Modules

Depending on your setup, Kernel Modules are technically an optional extra as kiOS will function on EFI nvme based systems, with generic ethernet.

However, it is quite likely that you will need to load some kernel modules, so it is suggest that the module archive is extracted to:

datapart:/modules

At runtime, kiOS will automatically mount this to /lib/modules which is where most systems expect kernel modules to live.

Installing the EFI (Boot Partition)

kiOS is a single EFI binary, so it should be installed on a EFI-compatible system. This means the binary should be placed on the EFI System Partition.

If it is the default / only OS to be run on the machine, it is often a good idea to place it in the EFI's default path: EFI/Boot/Bootx64.efi, however it can be placed elsewhere and configured via your system's UEFI Boot Order settings.

Kernel Parameters

If you have setup the data partition with the GPT Type GUID specified above, kiOS will auto-discover and mount the partition, however if you have installed it in a non-standard location, you may specify it explicitly via the kernel command line datapart parameter:

datapart=/dev/nvme1n1p3

Currently, datapart does not support UUIDs or other block device identifiers.