The release of the CoreBoot project 4.18 has been published, which is developing a free alternative to proprietary firmware and BIOS. The project's code is distributed under the GPLv2 license. More than 200 developers participated in the creation of the new version, preparing over 1800 changes.
Key Changes:
- Support has been added for 23 motherboards, 19 of which are used in devices with Chrome OS or on servers Google. Among the unrelated to Google boards:
- MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI DDR4
- AMD Birman
- AMD Pademelon
- Siemens MC APL7
- Support for the Google Brya4ES motherboard has been discontinued.
- Support for SoC Intel Meteor Lake, Mediatek Mt8188 and AMD Morgana has been added.
- In sconfig, the device tree structure compiler, describing the present hardware components, the ability to define operations for each device has been added. Operations are specified in the form of a C identifier, for example, 'device pci 00.0 alias system_agent on ops system_agent_ops end'.
- The ability to determine the presence of I2C devices during the creation of device entries in ACPI/SSDT tables has been added. This capability can be used to identify touchpads using the built-in 'detect' flag, eliminating the need for the previously used 'probed' flag specific to Linux kernels in ChromeOS.
- The capability to generate SBoM (Firmware Software Bill of Materials), which defines the composition of software components included in the firmware image, has been implemented, for example, for automating vulnerability checks or license analysis in firmware.
- Work continues on the fourth edition of the resource allocation mechanism (RESOURCE_ALLOCATOR_V4), which implements support for manipulating multiple resource ranges, using the entire address space, and allocating memory in areas above 4 GB.
- The mechanism for legacy multiprocessor mode initialization (LEGACY_SMP_INIT) has been declared obsolete, replaced by the PARALLEL_MP initialization code.
- A smbus console driver has been added.
- Support for the Linux 5.19 kernel has been provided in the checkpatch utility.
- The conversion of ACPI to ASL 2.0 syntax has continued.
- The payload component based on the UEFI stack EDK II (TianoCore) has been updated, which has been tested with Intel Core processors (from 2nd to 12th generation), Intel Small Core BYT, BSW, APL, GLK and GLK-R, AMD Stoney Ridge and Picasso.
Source: opennet.ru
