Coreboot 4.21 Brings More System76 Laptops, Star Labs & MSI Z790-P Support

Coreboot 4.21 is available this week as the newest tagged release for this open-source system BIOS/firmware solution. Coreboot 4.21 brings a number of new motherboard ports as well as various core improvements.

Some of the core enhancements with Coreboot 4.21 include improving its boot splash screen support around its JPEG decoder, a rewritten UCHI root-hub driver, extracting of TPM logs using the cbmem tool, the RISC-V code is now enabled to build with Clang, resource allocation above the 4GiB boundary has been improved, and a variety of other hardware improvements. Some of the integrated tooling inside of Coreboot has also been improved like Intel 700 series chipset support for the inteltool utility and Intel 800 series chipset support inside the ifdtool.

There are many new motherboards supported by upstream Coreboot 4.21, but as usual many of them are for Google Chromebooks. The complete list of new motherboard ports include:

- ByteDance ByteDance bd_egs
- Google: Craaskov
- Google: Expresso
- Google: Karis
- Google: Karis4ES
- Google: Pirrha
- Google: Ponyta
- Google: Screebo4ES
- Google: Ovis
- Google: Ovis4ES
- Google: Rex EC ISH
- Google: Rex4ES
- HP Compaq Elite 8300 USDT
- HP EliteBook 820 G2
- IBM SBP1
- Intel Raptorlake silicon with Alderlake-P RVP
- Inventec Transformers
- MSI PRO Z790-P (WIFI)
- MSI PRO Z790-P (WIFI) DDR4
- Star Labs Star Labs StarBook Mk VI (i3-1315U and i7-1360P)
- System76 addw3
- System76 bonw15
- System76 darp9
- System76 galp7
- System76 gaze17 3050
- System76 gaze17 3060-b
- System76 gaze18
- System76 lemp12
- System76 oryp11
- System76 serw13

Besides all of the Google Chromebook ports, the other standout is seeing all of the new System76 laptops upstreamed in Coreboot. These System76 laptops are already shipping Coreboot out-of-the-box while it's nice that System76 continues upstreaming these targets for ensuring their longevity and being a good upstream member of the Coreboot open-source community.

The other exciting board additions with Coreboot 4.21 is the recently covered Coreboot for the MSI Z790-P DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards thanks to the ongoing work by 3mdeb/Dasharo. It's great having a readily-available Intel Raptor Lake desktop motherboard with upstream Coreboot support, complementing 3mdeb's earlier MSI PRO Z690 work.

Another worthy shout-out is StarLabs with their continued Coreboot efforts. Their Intel Raptor Lake based Star Labs Star Labs StarBook Mk VI is now supported with Coreboot 4.21.

More details on the changes to find with Coreboot 4.21 can be found via the release notes. Coreboot also shared that following this release they will be transitioning development from the Git "master" branch to now using a Git "main" branch. There is also initial work on transforming Coreboot's code from camel case to snake case.