Coreboot News Archives

It's been one week since the Libreboot downstream of Coreboot announced it would leave the GNU and denounced the FSF over supposedly a transgendered individual having been fired by the this free software group. Both Richard Stallman and the FSF denounced these claims made by Libreboot maintainer Leah Rowe. Since then, no actual proof has been presented to back up these claims by the Libreboot maintainer but the drama around it has seemingly continued.

The Lenovo N21 Chromebook is now supported by mainline Coreboot. But then again that's not a huge surprise considering Google's focus on Chromebook/Chromebox support in Coreboot.

Those wishing to use Coreboot on a modern Intel system (albeit with the closed-source FSP) will soon have another option to consider with an open-source, physically secure computer powered by a Skylake-Y SoC moving ahead with a port to Coreboot.

Coreboot has mainlined a months-old patch to make the Ada programming language "a first class citizen" in this low-level open-source project.

A mini-ITX board running the GNU Libreboot downstream of Coreboot sounds interesting for a fully free software HTPC/media center PC, right? Too bad this new motherboard port is for an i945 board released back in 2008 and has integrated a painfully slow original, single-core Atom chip.

Acer's CXI2 Chromebox line-up is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

Landing in Coreboot Git this week is a "hybrid graphics driver" that benefits seemingly all Lenovo laptops (except the mux-less models) with dual GPUs.

Google engineers have been busy this week working on Coreboot: monsterous work at the start of the week, adding in a Qualcomm "Gale" device later in the week, and now today adding in support for another Chromebook.

Topping off a lot of Google code landing in Coreboot in recent days for Chromebooks is support for another Google device and as part of that support for a Qualcomm SoC.

Over night Google engineers landed a bunch more code in Coreboot for supporting new Chromebook devices.

The latest motherboard to receive mainline Coreboot support is the Siemens MC_BDX1.

While Xeon D (Broadwell-DE) hardware has been available for the past year, support for these SoCs is finally now in mainline Coreboot.

For fans of Coreboot, the Lenovo ThinkPad T420 has been ported to this open-source BIOS/UEFI alternative and is one of the more recent laptops to be independently ported to this code-base formerly known as LinuxBIOS.

A controversial point of Intel's Coreboot support has been the FSP, or Firmware Support Package, which is needed for initializing the systems on all recent hardware generations. With the upcoming Apollo Lake it appears there is now a "FSP 2.0", but still relies upon binary blobs.

Coreboot received some new Intel feature work yesterday for improving the state of initializing some newer hardware with this open-source alternative to proprietary UEFI/BIOS.

The POWER8 architectural code and initial motherboard port have landed in Coreboot.

Coreboot users have generally relied upon the SeaBIOS or TianoCore payloads for booting up into a Linux distribution, but now a U-Boot payload is supported as another option.

Intel engineers have begun landing support for the next-gen "Apollolake" SoC within Coreboot and support for the initial development board.

Well, this is interesting. The Intel Quark X1000 SoC now has very basic support within Coreboot.

This morning was news about Libreboot supporting another AMD server motherboard. Another motherboard -- this time an Intel board -- was added today since then to this Coreboot downstream that initializes the hardware without any proprietary firmware/microcode.

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

The controversial, crowd-funded Librem laptop that aimed to be fully open down to the firmware but ended up shipping with an AMI UEFI firmware for the initial release has now been ported to Coreboot for the Librem 13 model. The Coreboot support wasn't done by Purism, the company behind the Librem, but rather a Coreboot developer at Google.

This year we should finally see the release of the highly anticipated AMD Zen processors that will hopefully better position their processors to compete with Intel. However, one of the unanswered questions about this next-gen platform is whether it will support Coreboot as an optional open-source firmware to replace the proprietary UEFI/BIOS.

While the Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L is a motherboard from nearly a decade ago and is powered by the Intel G41 + ICH7 chipset combination, as of today it now has support in Libreboot for being able to initialize the hardware without any binary blobs.

SeaBIOS 1.9 has been out since last month as the latest version of this open-source implementation of a 16-bit x86 BIOS widely used by Coreboot, QEMU, and other projects.

This week there's been some new Intel motherboard support added to Coreboot.

Added to Coreboot this week was CC6 support to provide greater power-savings for current-generation AMD processors.

Coreboot developers are taking to their Git tree and dropping support for old motherboards and chipsets.

If by chance you have a Sun Ultra 40 M2, it's now supported by upstream Coreboot for freeing your BIOS.

Just days after Google added "Chell" to Coreboot as the new mainboard for some forthcoming Skylake-powered Chrome OS device, Google engineers have added another new Skylake product.

Google engineers have landed a bunch of new code this morning into Coreboot.

One of the frequent complaints about Coreboot/Libreboot when ported to new hardware (sans Chromebooks) is that it's often for rather old laptops or motherboards that are a number of years old and generally not even being still manufactured. To much pleasure, there's now a (AMD) server motherboard that's still in production and will work with Libreboot for initializing the system without requiring any proprietary blobs.

There hasn't been much modern hardware supported by Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that eliminates all binary blobs to be fully free software, but now the ASUS Chromebook C201 is supported by Libreboot.

With the latest Git code pushed into Coreboot this morning, the Apple MacBook Air 4,2 is now supported.

While not quite as much as the funding achieved for the Librem 15, the smaller Librem 13 crowd-funding campaign is set to close soon and has just passed its $250k USD funding goal for "a laptop that respects your rights", but there's still a lot of yet to be fulfilled hopes riding on this x86 laptop.

A Phoronix reader pointed out that as of last week there's been some ARM Libreboot love for allowing this binary blob free downstream of Coreboot to work on the ASUS C201.

Following the guest post this past weekend about Purism's Librem laptop remaining "blobbed up", the crowd-funded company has put out new information.

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

A Google engineer has added support in Coreboot for Glados, a forthcoming Chromebook that will feature a next-generation Skylake SoC.

Skylake is around the corner and now after an Intel engineer added Skylake SoC support to Coreboot, that work has been extended by adding support for the first Skylake motherboards in Coreboot.

Google engineers have added support for the Tegra X1 "T210" SoC to Coreboot. Additionally, they've added support for the "Smaug" Chromebook to Coreboot that uses this latest-generation NVIDIA Tegra 64-bit SoC.

The latest "Veyron" motherboard being added to the open-source Coreboot codebase is Shark.

The Libreboot "fork" of Coreboot now has support for its first AMD motherboard -- or more broadly, its first desktop motherboard.

Support for Auron has been added in Coreboot Git. Auron is the Google Broadwell Reference Motherboard, which in turn is based on Google's Peppy.

It's now easier to build Coreboot with the LLVM Clang compiler rather than GCC.

Support for two in-development Rockchip motherboard designs have been added to Coreboot for possible use in Chrome OS devices.

A new, low-cost Gigabyte motherboard that supports Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors is now supported by upstream Coreboot.

As a quick update to the initial Veyron motherboards being added to Coreboot, Google has now added more Veyron boards to mainline Coreboot.

There's some new Google motherboards added to upstream Coreboot.

For those searching for a low-cost system/motherboard for experimenting with Coreboot, there's another new AMD motherboard that now works with Coreboot's upstream Git code. The board costs only about $30 USD and works with all modern AMD AM1 processors.