The bootloader Gummiboot is being considered, according to the talk that Poettering gave at the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting in Brussels recently.

This would be an optional feature and users would be able to continue utilising their standard bootloader if they so wished.

Secure boot is a feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI, the replacement for the BIOS on the motherboard.

Microsoft has implemented secure boot for Windows 8, using cryptographic  keys for authenticating the kernel that is being loaded. This means that any other operating system looking to load itself on a secure boot-enabled Windows 8 system has to also be able to authenticate itself.

Some GNU/Linux distributions have developed their own methods of booting on such hardware.

Several distributions have adopted systemd, among them Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu.

Reaction to systemd has been mixed, with some developers even starting a fork of Debian, called Devuan, so that use of systemd can be avoided.

Part of the reaction is due to the fact that systemd does not stop with being a replacement for older init systems, but that it does a lot more.

For example, udev has been merged into systemd, it does logging and has substitutes for ntpd, cron, automount, inetd, and network configuration plus console daemon to replace the kernel's virtual terminals.