System76's Coreboot Open Firmware Manages To Disable Intel ME For Raptor Lake

Linux laptop/desktop vendor System76 has made some improvements to their Coreboot open firmware offerings to benefit their latest Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" wares as well as prior generation devices.

First and arguably most exciting is that they have managed to disable the Intel Management Engine (ME) for their new Intel Raptor Lake powered laptops. They resolved a bug with Coreboot that allowed System76 to go ahead and re-disable Intel ME on relevant devices. Intel ME is disabled for their latest Raptor lake laptops and most older platforms with some exceptions like where having a silicon issue with Tiger Lake.

System76 has also added a new firmware setup menu option for enabling/disabling UEFI Secure Boot. The motivation here with making it easier to toggle Secure Boot is for allowing Windows 11 support with SB active while running System76 Open Firmware.

Some other recent firmware changes made by this Colorado company include increasing the battery power limits allowing greater CPU performance, NVIDIA Dynamic Boost for laptops with NVIDIA RTX 40 series graphics, and firmware security update improvements. Plus they've made various fixes and also contributed Intel Maple Ridge Thunderbolt support to Coreboot.

More details on this exciting System76 firmware progress that is especially exciting for their latest Intel Raptor Lake laptops can be found via the System76 blog.