Coreboot News Archives

Yabits was announced last month at the OSFC 2018 conference in Erlangen, Germany. Yabits is a lighter-weight alternative to the open-source TianoCore UEFI implementation and other commonly used proprietary UEFI implementations by motherboard vendors.

LinuxBoot is the year-old project for replacing proprietary UEFI implementations with the Linux kernel in essence. Adoption continues to grow for LinuxBoot and is now being used inside several large corporations.

Last week SiFive published their HiFive Unleashed open-source boot-loader code for this first RISC-V SoC on their Linux-friendly development board. This code being open-sourced has already helped improve the support for the FU540 SoC within Coreboot.

If by chance you happen to have an ASUS P8H61-M LX motherboard from the Sandy/Ivy Bridge days or are able to locate one of the boards through used/refurbished channels, this motherboard can now be freed down to the BIOS with Coreboot.

Several Chromebooks now have upstream support for Coreboot.

Thanks to Facebook / Open Compute Project, the Octeon CN81xx SoCs are now supported by upstream Coreboot and happen to be the first Cavium ARM SoCs supported by this project.

Two interesting mainboards are now supported by mainline Coreboot Git.

The ASUS P8H61-M PRO is now the latest motherboard working with mainline Coreboot.

Coreboot's latest development code now supports parsing and booting of FIT payloads. FIT in this context is a Flattened Image Tree that leverages DeviceTree.

If by chance you happen to have an Intel DG41WV motherboard, it's now supported by mainline Coreboot so you can free the system down to the BIOS.

While many Coreboot users just habitually ride the latest Git code, for those sticking to official stable releases, Coreboot 4.8 was released today.

If you happen to have an HP Elitebook 8770w laying around from Intel's Ivy Bridge era, that Hewlett Packard laptop has now been freed by Coreboot.

While Purism had already been shipping Coreboot on their Librem 15 v2 laptop two years ago and has already succeeded by their third revision that does have mainline Coreboot support, the support was merged today to Coreboot proper for the Librem 15 v2.

Mainline Coreboot has merged support for two Facebook Open Compute Project (OCP) boards as the first being added under this umbrella.

Landing today within the Coreboot Git tree is support for the RISC-V based SiFive Freedom Unleashed 540 System-on-a-Chip and SiFive's Unleashed mainboard making use of this SoC built around the royalty-free and open processor ISA.

A number of improvements to Coreboot were merged to Git master overnight.

Coreboot is off to a busy start of the week with a number of notable enhancements having been merged to Git this morning.

While there doesn't appear to be too many Intel BayTrail users out there running systems with Coreboot, this generation of hardware that's been a bit notorious with Linux users due to varying issues can now find at least a bit better graphics support with the latest Coreboot code.

Purism has released updated Coreboot images for their Librem 13 v2 and Librem 15 v3 laptops.

A European cloud and dedicated server provider that designs their own servers is now designing their own BIOS using Coreboot and using this in production on thousands of servers.

A new Coreboot frame-buffer driver has been published for the Linux kernel that allows reusing of the frame-buffer setup by Coreboot during the hardware initialization process.

Coreboot 4.7 is now available as the latest release of this free and open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement.

The latest Coreboot Git code now has support for the ASUS AM1I-A motherboard.

The Flashrom utility that's associated with the Coreboot project for reading/writing/erasing/verifying flash chips commonly for motherboard BIOS/UEFI/firmware chips has reached its long-awaited v1.0 milestone.

If you happen to have an older Sandy Bridge era Intel NUC, it may now supported by mainline Coreboot.

Coreboot is now able to replace the proprietary BIOS on some older Lenovo ThinkPads.

For those interested in the open-source Coreboot project that serves as a replacement to proprietary UEFI/BIOS, the videos from their European Coreboot Conference are now available.

For those still happen to be using an Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge processor and have the ASRock B75 Pro3-M motherboard, it's now working under Coreboot.

Those not regularly using Coreboot may have not realized that it didn't yet have UEFI support, but now it does.

Intel developers continue working on Cannonlake support for Coreboot while sadly we've seen no activity yet for getting Ryzen/Epyc CPUs working with Coreboot.

Last week I wrote about Librem 13 v2 support landing in upstream Coreboot while now more work for this Purism laptop is now set in Git.

For those following the progress on Purism's new inventory of Librem 13 v2 and 15 laptops shipping with Coreboot, the Librem 13 v2 laptop code is now in upstream Coreboot.

Coreboot has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy as a member project.

Purism is preparing to ship their updated Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops with Coreboot.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T430 laptop is now supported by mainline Coreboot Git.

Coreboot 4.6 has been released as the project's first official release of 2017.

For those with a first-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop, it's now supported by mainline Coreboot.

It may not be as exciting as hearing Dell looking at Coreboot, but another Intel-powered Chromebook is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

Dell appears to be using Coreboot on some of their modern Intel Atom motherboards paired with the Intel FSP and TianoCore.

According to Purism's Youness Alaoui, their Coreboot port to the Librem 13 v1 laptop is now considered complete.

While Raptor Engineering was unsuccessful with their Talos Secure Workstation effort to build a high-end, libre POWER8 workstation, they are now backing a more realistic effort: opening the Baseboard Management Controller of an ASUS server motherboard still on the market.

There are some new boards now supported by mainline Coreboot.

Librecore is a new project aiming to be a new Coreboot downstream with a focus remaining on providing fully-free system firmware. Separately, Minifree/Libreboot has been accused (and admitted by Leah Rowe) to not paying a vendor for a completed contract.

While Chromebook / ChromeOS fans have been looking forward to the Kabylake-based "Eve" device, it looks like another device is possibly forthcoming making use of these latest-generation Intel CPUs.

Reproducible builds have been a big theme in particularly the last year or two with being able to verify the binaries offered by open-source projects are bit-for-bit the same against the same set of sources. With the latest Coreboot work, all of their generated images are now reproducible from source.

If you still are running Intel i945 era hardware, you may be happy to know another motherboard from this time is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

It has been a long time since last seeing any new AMD support in Coreboot while that changed this past week with the arrival of the mainline Stoney Ridge support.

I haven't seen Google announce any Intel Kabylake powered Chromebooks yet, but activity indicates that they may not be too far out with now having mainlined Coreboot support for a new device codenamed "Eve".

As some early post-Coreboot 4.5 changes are some work to benefit fans of the RISC-V ISA.

Coreboot 4.5 is now available as the latest version of this open-source BIOS/firmware implementation project for those looking toward the bi-annual releases rather than Git.