Coreboot News Archives

While yesterday I was talking about many Intel Broadwell improvements landing in Coreboot, the new Git activity today for Coreboot is about 64-bit ARM.

While Google Chromebooks up to this point have tended to be ARM-based along with some using low-power Atom x86 SoCs, it appears Imagination Technologies is working towards some MIPS design wins for these Internet-focused devices. Imagination has been working on MIPS improvements within Coreboot as a ChromeOS partner.

While you probably don't have a Siemens motherboard underneath your desk, the company has committed support for another one of their motherboards to Coreboot.

While recently modern Intel hardware is negatively talked about the most when it comes to needing binary blobs / binary-only microcode to work with the open-source Coreboot, other hardware can be problematic too.

A Coreboot developer has confirmed fears over Purism Librem laptops not really being free nor really bringing much to the table compared to other Linux laptop vendors.

While Coreboot support for systems with newer Intel CPUs is tough, Coreboot gained yesterday support for some new AMD CPUs.

While Coreboot has been ported to a number of older ThinkPads and other outdated Intel motherboards and laptops, you don't see many modern Intel systems supporting Coreboot. The reason for the lack of Coreboot support is due to a "feature" introduced with Haswell.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T430s is now the latest laptop to be running atop Coreboot as an alternative to its proprietary UEFI/BIOS.

The Coreboot project has now ported over the XGI Z9s frame-buffer support from the Linux kernel.

The latest motherboard being supported by Coreboot for replacing the board's proprietary BIOS is the ASUS KFSN4-DRE.

Coreboot now has support for the "Tegra132" 64-bit Denver NVIDIA Tegra SoC as well as a new Google Chromebook that's codenamed "Rush" and using this NVIDIA ARMv8 platform.

Coreboot is off to a great start of 2015 as already this year behind a new ThinkPad port and more Intel Broadwell work, there's now a port for a new HP board.

It looks like the launch of some Intel Broadwell low-power Chromebooks could be coming very soon.

While Coreboot is most commonly used by Google Chromebooks, an increasing number of Lenovo ThinkPad laptops are becoming compatible with Coreboot for initializing and booting the system with open-source software.

For months now there's been Coreboot developers working on Intel Broadwell support (primarily from Google and focused on future Chromebook support). With the start of the new year and hopefully seeing more Broadwell hardware on the market soon, that support is coming along in Coreboot.

Coreboot has now been ported to UC Berkeley's RISC-V architecture and can at least work in an emulated environment.

It appears that Google engineers are getting ready Intel Broadwell support for future Chromebooks/Chromeboxes. Broadwell support is now present within Coreboot.

As of today there's now mainline Coreboot support for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) thanks to work originally done by Google.

Just days after support for AMD's Steppe Eagle SoC landed in Coreboot, the first motherboard for this embedded G-Series SoC is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

Besides Coreboot for the Lenovo X220, other exciting code advancements this weekend for this project to replace proprietary systems' UEFI/BIOS is support for AMD's Steppe Eagle SoC.

This month on Phoronix I covered Coreboot gaining support for the ThinkPad X200 and support for older MacBooks (along with the Chromebook Samus) while now Coreboot is enabling support for some newer ThinkPad laptops.

As of today Google's upcoming "Samus" Chromebook is supported by Coreboot.

As an update to yesterday's story about Coreboot now working for the MacBook 2,1 model, with today's Git activity the open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement will also work with the even older 1,1 model.

After the Lenovo X200 support the latest laptop supporting Coreboot is Apple's second-generation MacBook.

The latest feature hitting mainline Coreboot is native graphics initialization support for the Intel GM45 chipset.

The Lenovo X200 laptop is the latest system being supported by mainline Coreboot.

Coreboot is now able to boot the MinnowBoard MAX, the latest x86 mini single-board computer.

The latest addition to Coreboot is native RAM initialization support for Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge families.

Support for Intel's Bayley Bay CRB has been added to Coreboot.

There's been a lot of new hardware to become supported by Coreboot lately while the newest addition is the handling of the Lenovo Thinkpad T520.

After Google Chrome OS developers committed a lot more of Intel's Bay Trail support for Coreboot earlier this week, more Bay Trail related code has kept landing for this open-source BIOS/UEFI alternative.

Chrome OS developers at Google have landed improvements within Coreboot for Bay Trail given Chromebooks starting to ship with this low-power Intel hardware.

Packard Bell's EasyNote LM85 notebook now has mainline Coreboot support for those wishing to replace its proprietary BIOS.

The Coreboot open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement now has initial support for the Lenovo ThinkPad T530 notebook.

Coreboot developers have added in mainline support for another HP Pavilion notebook.

After Google landed "Bay Trail" support in Coreboot and then followed up with more Bay Trail changes for a forthcoming Chromebook with one of these low-power processors with in-house graphics, the support for this "Rambi" device is being rounded out.

It looks like the Google Chromebooks powered by Intel's Atom and Celeron "Bay Trail" SoCs may be very imminent now... More code is being pushed into the open-source Coreboot project for bringing up Bay Trail support.

The Coreboot open-source alternative to using proprietary motherboard BIOS firmwares now supports a new AMD Fusion motherboard in the upstream code.

Intel's exciting "Bay Trail" Atom platform is now supported by Coreboot! This is great news since this Atom SoC is exciting for its use of in-house HD Graphics and also since this signals a Bay Trail Chromebook coming soon.

The latest Lenovo device picking up unofficial support for booting with Coreboot is the X230.

It's been an exciting past few weeks for the open-source Coreboot project. After 2013 was ended by the FSF endorsing its first (Coreboot-powered) laptop and Google landing a lot of Coreboot changes to benefit the increasingly popular Chromebooks, January already got off to a good start with AMD Gizmosphere support coming to mainline Coreboot and Allwinner A10 / Cubieboard support. The latest work in the Coreboot world are Lenovo laptop improvements.

The Allwinner A10 ARM SoC is now supported by Coreboot along with the A10-based Cubieboard.

There's now mainline Coreboot support for the Gizmo AMD APU development board.

Google landed a large number of Coreboot changes over the weekend, particularly improving the Samsung Exynos 5420 Octa and Intel Lynxpoint / Haswell hardware support.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X201 laptop is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

After landing hardware support improvements last week for Coreboot, the open-source BIOS firmware replacement now has another new feature: ACPI power limiting and it's been implemented for Intel Haswell CPUs.

Google is keeping to their open-source promise and preparing for an onslaught of Chrome OS devices with many changes the past few days being pushed into the Coreboot open-source firmware project widely used by Chromebooks. Besides the Google "Slippy" Chromebook being added this weekend was "Falco", "Peppy", and other new hardware support.

As of Saturday night the "Slippy" is the latest Google Chromebook to be supported by the open-source Coreboot firmware. As with supporting other Chromebooks, adding support for the codenamed Haswell mobile device added a great deal of new code.

For those using the Coreboot open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement on Lenovo laptops, the proprietary hotkeys have now been implemented.

Coreboot's latest development code now features GRUB 2 as an alternative to SeaBIOS in its build system.