"100% Free" GNU Boot Discovers Again They Have Been Shipping Non-Free Code

[KoenDG]

Egad. Shocked. I say, shocked.

[ssokolow]

can't people teach the kernel to boot on its own without loaders? such an approach would solve many problems.

"GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS."

The problematic parts are the replacements for the UEFI firmware your motherboard ships with, not the bootloader.

It's already possible to do what you propose using the kernel's UEFI stub option. It's how I boot some Debian-based mini PCs as part of minimizing the boot time as far as possible without excess maintenance hassle. Stuff like GRUB is only still used to provide a single unified boot process across as many supported platforms as possible to minimize maintenance/testing/support burdens for distros.

[EphemeralEft]

…And nobody noticed because their hardware is already a black box running proprietary firmware baked into the circuits.

[ddriver]

The shame!

[edxposed]

The 100% free firmware is 100% a 100% unbootable toy.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "100% Free" GNU Boot Discovers Again They Have Been Shipping Non-Free Code

GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Boot-Second-Fail