The release of the CoreBoot project on September 26 has been published, developing a free alternative to proprietary firmware and BIOS. The project's code is distributed under the GPLv2 license. The new version includes 1251 changes prepared with the participation of 112 developers, 28 of whom participated in the development for the first time.
Key Changes:
- Support has been implemented for 26 motherboards:
- Acer TravelMate P633-M and P633-V;
- Apple iMac4,1;
- ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer and Z97 Anniversary;
- ASUS B85M-E, Maximus VI GENE, Maximus VII GENE, and ASUS Maximus VII HERO;
- Framework Laptop 12 (13th Gen Intel Core);
- GIGABYTE MZ33-AR1;
- Intel NUC D33217GKE;
- LattePanda Mu DFR1141, DFR1142;
- Lenovo ThinkPad X380 Yoga, ThinkStation P320;
- MSI PRO B760-P WIFI DDR4 (MS-7D98);
- NVIDIA Porg (Jetson Nano);
- Qotom Q535G6;
- Sapphire Rave2 (Faegan);
- Siemens FA ASL;
- 5 motherboards used in various devices with Chrome OS or on servers Google.
- An audit of external data parsers has been conducted to prevent vulnerabilities. Protection against reading from areas beyond the buffer has been implemented. Size and boundary checks have been added in the BMP renderer, CBFS (CoreBoot File System), and FMAP (Flash Map). Integrity checks for FDT (Flattened Device Tree) headers have been ensured. Protection against cyclical recursion during bus element traversal has been added. Emergency shutdown of the boot process has been implemented in case of SMM (System Management Mode) initialization failure.
- The firmware and host tools (ifdtool, cbmem) have been transitioned to using the C23 standard (-std=gnu23), which requires GCC 14+ or Clang 18+ compilers.
- For Intel platforms, support for DDR5 SPD cache has been added, maintaining SHA-256 integrity hash in TPM NVRAM (SPD_CACHE_TPM_HASH).
- Support for Realtek audio codecs (ALC1150, ALC662/892/1200) has been improved.
- ACPI generation for IPU3 MIPI camera stacks has been enhanced.
- Experimental support for AMD Turin processors has been added, implementing the CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Control) mechanism, IOAPIC interrupt routing, and FADT/amdfwtool configuration. Support for the first motherboard on the EPIC platform — GIGABYTE MZ33-AR1 — has also been added.
- Menus with CFR (Customizable Firmware Runtime) settings have been expanded, and EC firmware (Embedded Controller firmware) menus for Lenovo boards and ChromeEC, as well as Intel ME and Hyper-Threading management menus, have been implemented.
- The ability to activate the console via the serial port during operation has been provided.
- The project policy on the use of AI tools for code review has been approved, and a file AGENTS.md with instructions for AI agents has been created (mandatory tagging of AI comments with the flag "[AI-generated]", allowing only new issue reports, prohibiting review flag settings, adherence to coding style, and prohibition of actions in Gerrit).
- Updated versions of binutils 2.46.1, LLVM 22.1.8, NASM 3.02, CMake 4.3.4, MPC 1.4.1.
Additionally, the new release schedule for the LibreBoot project can be noted. Releases are planned to be issued flexibly as needed — every 6 to 24 months (usually 8 to 16 months) — rather than fixed at twice a year in January and December as was attempted previously. This year, a release intended for June was decided to be skipped. The planned December release will also be missed, with the next release only being formed in the summer of 2027, i.e., a year and a half after the last LibreBoot update. This change in the release approach will allow for more thorough testing and prevent releases from feeling rushed or incomplete.
Source: opennet.ru
