Libreboot Sees First New Release In Nearly 5 Years, Supports More Old Motherboards

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form.

Libreboot 20210522 allows more Intel GM45 / X3X era hardware to work with this fully open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware. New boards supported by this Libreboot release include the Acer G43T-AM3, Lenovo ThinkPad R500, Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and Intel G43T-AM3. Yeah, it's quite hard in 2021 to get excited about Socket 775 motherboards or 45nm Penryn laptops. Libreboot is largely limited to supporting these outdated platforms due to its focus on being fully open-source and not using any Intel FSP binaries, etc.

With this release it now takes Libreboot to supporting around a dozen boards between many old Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, a few old Apple Macs, and some old AMD Opteron server motherboards. There was Libreboot support for the newer ASUS Chromebook C201 but it was removed with this release since Libreboot's build system isn't integrating well on Arm at the moment.

More details on this new Libreboot release for your vintage hardware can be found at Libreboot.org.