Coreboot Gives Some Love To Purism Librem & Google Tidus

Today was another busy day in the Coreboot world for freeing systems of their proprietary BIOS/firmware.

A few days ago I wrote about Coreboot being ported to the Purism Librem laptop by a Google engineer and beat the company to it even though that was one of the original goals for this "open-source friendly" laptop. However, due to restrictions by Intel and others, that Coreboot port still isn't 100% free but does rely upon binary blobs.

Google's Duncan Laurie further improved that Purism Librem laptop support by adding basic ACPI support for the used EC. This now allows Coreboot to support battery information, AC presence, lid switch, special/hot keys, and EC events. However, there is not yet EC SMI handling and the fan is left under the EC control. This continue to be just work done in Duncan's spare time and is not officially sanctioned by Purism.

Among the other Coreboot commits today is also initial support for Google's Tidus. Tidus is the codename for the Lenovo ThinkCentre Chromebox. Previously this Tidus / ThinkCentre Chromebox support was just in their Chromium tree while now it's all been upstreamed in Coreboot per this commit. Pricing on the ThinkCentre Chromebox varies with different specs.