While not exactly a big surprise with System76 having done an "OSFC Edition" Coreboot laptop at small scale at the end of the summer, but System76 is now formally announcing two Linux laptops shipping with Coreboot as an alternative to their proprietary BIOS.

There was recently a debate on the Coreboot mailing list about the mission statement / description of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement for systems that traditionally has liberated boards from proprietary BIOS but still on modern platforms is often pulling in a number of binary blobs.

Oreboot has been in development for a number of months now and while at first may have sounded like a novelty downstream of Coreboot is now proving its usefulness and taking shape.

Ghidra is the open-source reverse engineering tool published by the US National Security Agency as an alternative to existing decompilers/disassemblers and other reverse engineering utilities. As noted earlier this summer, a Google Summer of Code project has been creating Ghidra plug-ins for helping with firmware reverse engineering.

System76 has been making good strides on their Coreboot support for their hardware and they are now readying a System76 Darter Pro OSFC Edition as their apparent first laptop to ship with Coreboot in place of the proprietary BIOS.

While the tide may be eventually turning, as it stands today for those wanting to run Coreboot on x86 desktop/server hardware you are largely limited to generations-old platforms. But now there is a new option and that is a Coreboot port having been completed to a modern Supermicro motherboard for use with Intel Xeon "Kabylake" processors.

Coreboot 4.10 was released today with some 2,500+ commits over the past eight months for this increasingly popular open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS implementations.

With Linux PC vendors System76 and Purism among those embracing Coreboot for freeing more of the system and appealing to open-source enthusiasts, Linux PC vendor TUXEDO from Germany is also eyeing a similar move.

Coreboot now supports the UP Squared, the new single board computer / maker board based on an Intel Apollo Lake SoC.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has developers contributing to the Coreboot project.

Earlier this month we reported on a new Google Summer of Code project making use of NSA software to help with firmware reverse engineering. So far that effort seems to be paying off of using Ghidra.

It's not often the National Security Agency (NSA) can be thanked for their contributions to society, but in the case of one of their public open-source projects it's going to be used to help the Coreboot folks in reverse-engineering system firmware.

For the past number of months Linux PC maker System76 has been beginning to work on Coreboot support for their products and over the course of May they addressed more obstacles in order to begin having this open-source firmware implementation work on some of their laptops.

Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co with its Hygon Dhyana processor that is based on AMD Zen IP appears to be pursuing Coreboot support.

The Coreboot open-source firmware/BIOS project has finally seen initial AMD Zen CPU support as part of Google engineers bringing up Picasso APU support in order to handle an upcoming Chromebook launch.

Purism's Coreboot support for their laptops has evolved nicely over the past two years after initially not having support. While their devices have been shipping with Coreboot for some time now, Coreboot updates up until now have involved having to build them from source, but now they are offering pre-built binaries.

Last week during Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, some interesting details were revealed by Intel and their work on this open-source hardware initialization effort alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware.

In addition to measured boot support being worked on for Coreboot to enhance the security of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement, support for working with Intel TXT - Trusted Execution Technology - is also happening.

Developers have been working on TPM-backed measured boot support with Coreboot. The patches are pending for upstream Coreboot to be able to offer this trusted boot integration.

Purism has another announcement to make today... PureBoot! PureBoot is the privacy-minded, Linux-focused company's collection of safeguards to protect the boot process while empowering the end-user.

Several System76 laptops are beginning to see Coreboot support! This is a nice sign of progress in making System76 hardware more attractive to Linux/open-source users though they aren't yet shipping Coreboot on the systems by default.

It was just at the end of January last year when the Linux Foundation announced LinuxBoot to replace some firmware with the Linux kernel as another step for freeing traditionally proprietary firmware mostly on server hardware. LinuxBoot does continue making advanced at least on server class hardware and shows a lot of potential for 2019.

The Coreboot folks are ending out 2018 with the release of version 4.9 that has 2,610 changes since their previous release just over a half-year ago.

Intel developers have been punctual in their bring-up of Icelake support within Coreboot.

There are many Sandy Bridge era motherboards that have been freed by Coreboot while if you are looking for more options on something (slightly) newer, a micro-ATX Haswell-era motherboard from ASRock now works under this open-source BIOS implementation.

Last week I wrote about new patches adding Coreboot Flashrom support for Radeon GPUs for being able to re-program the SPI blocks on AMD graphics processors. Initially that was for old Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series hardware but now it's moved onto the GCN world.

Former RadeonHD driver developer Luc Verhaegen is back at the AMD Radeon GPU reverse-engineering game. He's now pursuing Radeon firmware flashing with the Coreboot Flashrom utility.

The OpenBMC project hosted by the Linux Foundation to begin providing open-source Baseboard Management Controller firmware stacks is planning for its first major/official release in 2019 as this collaborative community project from leading software and hardware vendors.

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.