The release of free bootable Libreboot firmware 20230319 is presented. The project develops a ready assembly of the coreboot project, which provides a replacement for proprietary UEFI and BIOS firmware responsible for initializing the CPU, memory, peripherals and other hardware components, minimizing binary inserts.
Libreboot aims to create a system environment that completely dispenses with proprietary software, not only at the level of the operating system, but also the firmware that provides booting. Libreboot not only cleans coreboot of non-free components, but also adds tools to make it easier for end users to use, creating a distribution that can be used by any user with no special skills.
Among the supported hardware in Libreboot:
- Desktop systems Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L, Intel D510MO, Intel D410PT, Intel D945GCLF and Apple iMac 5,2.
- Notebooks: ThinkPad X60 / X60S / X60 Tablet, ThinkPad T60, Lenovo ThinkPad X200 / X200S / X200 Tablet/ X220 / X230, Lenovo ThinkPad R400, Lenovo ThinkPad T400 / T400S/ T420 / T440, Lenovo ThinkPad T500 / T530, Lenovo ThinkPad W500 / W530, Lenovo ThinkPad R500, Apple MacBook1 and MacBook2, and various Chromebooks from ASUS, Samsung, Acer, and HP.
In the new release:
- Added support for Lenovo ThinkPad W530 and T530 laptops. Support for the HP EliteBook 8560w, Lenovo G505S, and Dell Latitude E6400 is expected in the next release.
- Support for Asus p2b_ls and p3b_f boards has been dropped.
- For boards with processors based on the Haswell microarchitecture, the code for memory initialization (raminit) has been adapted. Work tested on ThinkPad T440p and ThinkPad W541 laptops.
- Resolves sleep (S3) issues on ThinkPad T440p and ThinkPad W541 laptops.
- GRUB has forced console output mode (GRUB_TERMINAL=console) without changing the video mode, which improved the display of boot menus of installation media of some Linux distributions.
- Most x86 boards are in sync with the CoreBoot codebase as of February 2023, including porting improvements for devices based on Haswell microarchitecture (ThinkPad T440p/W541).
- Ported changes from the current GRUB and SeaBIOS codebases.
- Timeout in grub.cfg reduced from 10 to 5 seconds.
- For ThinkPad GM45 notebooks, the default allocated video memory has been reduced from 352MB to 256MB.
- Reworked nvmutil code base.
In addition, the author of Libreboot began the development of a new minimalistic Live distribution for system recovery after failures. Similar to the Heads distribution, the project develops a Flash-hosted stripped-down system environment that can be loaded from LibreBoot, CoreBoot, or LinuxBoot, but instead of being built as a payload, the new project plans to prepare a separate system image that is loaded into CBFS and called from intermediate payloads with GRUB or SeaBIOS capable of running executable files hosted on Flash.
The project is interesting in that it is planned to combine the Linux kernel, the standard Musl C library and tools from the base OpenBSD environment. To implement this idea, the development of the lobase project was continued, which was engaged in porting OpenBSD utilities for Linux, but abandoned 5 years ago (the author of Libreboot created a fork of lobase, which was updated to OpenBSD 7.2 and ported to Musl). It is planned to use the apk-tools tool from Alpine Linux for package management and installation of additional programs, and the abuild and aports build tools for imaging. Once the fork of the OpenBSD userspace is ready, it is planned to be handed over to the Alpine project for use as an alternative to the BusyBox package.
Additionally, we can note the announcement of the CloudFW 2.0 project with the implementation of firmware based on Coreboot and LinuxBoot to replace UEFI, which provides a full-fledged open firmware stack for x86 servers. Development is being led by Chinese company Bytedance (owns TikTok), which uses CloudFW on hardware in its infrastructure.
Source: opennet.ru