Libreboot Ported To A Sub-$200 ARM Chromebook

A Phoronix reader pointed out that as of last week there's been some ARM Libreboot love for allowing this binary blob free downstream of Coreboot to work on the ASUS C201.

Paul Kocialkowski announced last week that he's managed to get the ASUS Chromebook C201 running on Libreboot, meaning no binary blobs are involved in the hardware initialization process or in the hardware boot process. The C201 uses a Rockchip RK3288 SoC and by default ships with Google's version of Coreboot.

Libreboot support makes the C201 a fairly free-software-friendly device plus that it uses Google's embedded controller that's backed by free software. One hairy part about this device is the Broadcom BCM4354 for WiFi and Bluetooth does require a proprietary firmware module in its open-source driver.

Though the complicated part of the device is that it relies on a Mali T764 graphics processor, which has no suitable free software driver. Out of the Lima/Tamil projects setup to provide reverse-engineered support for ARM Mali graphics, there isn't code flowing.

More on Libreboot for the C201 Chromebook can be found via this mailing list post. The Chromebook C201 pricing is $159 for the 2GB RAM version or $189 for the 4GB model.