Libreboot Adds Experimental ThinkPad R500 Support

Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that strips out all binary blobs / microcode / firmware, has added experimental support for a new ThinkPad laptop.

As of today in Libreboot Git is experimental support for the Lenovo ThinkPad R500 laptop. This support was done by Francis Rowe of Gluglug, the company behind the FSF-endorsed laptop.

Due to not allowing binary blobs of any kind, Libreboot up to now has supported mostly just a few older MacBooks and ThinkPads along with an ASUS motherboard. This is because upstream Coreboot allows numerous binary blobs in enabling hardware support, which doesn't sit well with the Free Software Foundation and others.

The R500 experimental commit mentions, "The ich9deblob and ich9gen utilities were modified, so that they support reading and/or writing descriptor images where the GbE region is not defined. These utilities were also re-factored and tidied up a bit. There are still some ACPI bugs, which will have to be fixed upstream. TODO: get hw reg dumps from a factory R500, and compare with the X200 or T400 dumps."