Libreboot 20220710 Released As Coreboot Downstream Focused On Boot Firmware Freedom

Leah Rowe has announced the release of Libreboot 20220710, the downstream of Coreboot that takes a firm approach to ensure boot firmware freedom with avoiding proprietary blobs even when it means reduced hardware coverage/support. As such with avoiding the likes of the Intel FSP, the supported list of motherboards is quite limited.

Libreboot 20220710 is the project's first new stable release since November. While much time has passed, this is just a bug-fix release and doesn't introduce any major new features. There is though lots of documentation improvements, performance improvements to the grub.cfg handling, disabling PECI to workaround issues with old GM45/ICH9M laptops, build system improvements, disabling by default serial output on all motherboards to prevent boot speed issues, enabling USB keyboards for the GRUB configuration, initial U-Boot integration to be used by boards in the future, updating to a newer Flashrom, and various other fixes.

The hardware compatibility page for Libreboot notes a variety of old Apple MacBooks and Lenovo ThinkPads as being supported, old AMD Opteron motherboards, and a few old Intel desktop motherboards from around 2009.

More details on the changes for this weekend's Libreboot stable update can be found on Libreboot.org.

Moving forward their road-map goals include adding support for non-x86 platforms, exploring a Linux distro in flash memory, re-factoring/optimizing the GRUB bootloader, and merging of OSboot and Libreboot code.