System76 Is Making Progress On Open-Source Firmware For Their Laptops

For the past number of months Linux PC maker System76 has been beginning to work on Coreboot support for their products and over the course of May they addressed more obstacles in order to begin having this open-source firmware implementation work on some of their laptops.

When it comes to their firmware hacking efforts during May 2019, here is what they wrote in their monthly status report: "The camera toggle hotkey is now functional. The last remaining hardware issues with running open firmware on our laptops lie with Thunderbolt. On Whiskey Lake chipsets, the Thunderbolt controller is often not in a functional state after suspending/resuming the system. On Kaby Lake chipsets, the Thunderbolt controller is never visible...A new BIOS setup menu is also being designed for our open firmware so that the look and feel is consistent with the beautiful aesthetic you can expect from a System76 product. This will be implemented once the new firmware is ready for release."

In other news, they have enhanced the braces for their Thelio Major PC case to survive shipping better, they are rolling UK keyboard layout options to more laptops, Pop!_OS now ships with VA-API and VDPAU hardware decoding enabled by default, and various other updates.

More details on the System76 blog.