The release of the CoreBoot 4.18 project has been published, within which a free alternative to proprietary firmware and BIOS is being developed. The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 license. More than 200 developers took part in the creation of the new version, who prepared more than 1800 changes.
Major changes:
- Added support for 23 motherboards, 19 of which are used on Chrome OS devices or Google servers. Among non-Google boards:
- MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI DDR4
- AMD Birman
- AMD Pademelon
- Siemens MC APL7
- Dropped support for Google Brya4ES motherboard.
- Added support for Intel Meteor Lake, Mediatek Mt8188 and AMD Morgana SoCs.
- Added the ability to define operations for each device to sconfig, a compiler for the device tree structure that describes the hardware components present. 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".
- Added the ability to detect the presence of i2c devices when creating device records in ACPI/SSDT tables. This feature can be used to detect touchpads using the native “detect” flag, bypassing the previously used “probed” flag for touchpads, which is specific to the Linux kernels used in ChromeOS.
- Implemented the ability to generate SBoM (Firmware Software Bill of Materials), which determine the composition of the software components included in the firmware image, for example, to automate checking for vulnerabilities or analyzing licenses in the firmware.
- Work continued 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 above 4 GB.
- The classic initialization mechanism for multiprocessor mode (LEGACY_SMP_INIT) has been declared obsolete, replaced by the PARALLEL_MP initialization code.
- Added smbus console driver.
- The checkpatch utility provides support for the Lunux 5.19 kernel.
- Continued translation of ACPI to ASL 2.0 syntax.
- Updated payload component based on the UEFI stack EDK II (TianoCore), which was 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