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

[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

[edxposed]

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

[ddriver]

The shame!

[EphemeralEft]

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

[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.

[KoenDG]

Egad. Shocked. I say, shocked.

[pgeorgi]

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

That was the original plan in 1999, which is why coreboot was called LinuxBIOS. It was, in fact, a Linux kernel extended with just enough init code to bring up the mainboard it was running on. Various factors (including ever more complex hardware bringup routines) eventually made LinuxBIOS diverge from that model, and so it was renamed to coreboot around 2008.

There's the LinuxBoot project these days that wants to bring the old concept back in some way: still using a butchered UEFI or even coreboot for early init, but then jumping into Linux (from flash) as soon as possible.

[royce]

Where my LILO vets at?

[Espionage724]

You didn't understand. The Linux kernel will receive all the necessary information from UEFI to boot. but the Linux kernel will load on its own. The linux kernel will need UEFI only to provide the boot information. then we won't be afraid of who and when and how UEFI is written and what it contains.

Tianocore?

[intelfx]

You didn't understand. The Linux kernel will receive all the necessary information from UEFI to boot. but the Linux kernel will load on its own. The linux kernel will need UEFI only to provide the boot information. then we won't be afraid of who and when and how UEFI is written and what it contains.

Big surprise, that’s exactly how it works right now.

But if you had any kind of clue, you’d have already known that.