Coreboot News Archives

There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone achieved with the openSIL + Coreboot bring-up on the MSI PRO B850-P motherboard.

For those that had purchased a StarBook MK VI laptop 3+ years ago over the advertised support for Coreboot, Star Labs has now delivered with a Coreboot build finally available and working for this AMD Ryzen 5000 series powered laptop.

Coreboot 26.03 was christened today as the newest quarterly feature release for this open-source system firmware implementation that strives to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware. Most notable with Coreboot 26.03 is full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake SoCs.

In addition to the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm porting Coreboot with AMD openSIL to an EPYC 9005 "Turin" Gigabyte motherboard, their developers have also been working on a similar Coreboot + openSIL port to an AM5 Ryzen consumer motherboard.

Work is underway by 9elements on porting Coreboot plus AMD openSIL to the first-generation Ryzen 7000 series Framework 16 laptop and is expected to be followed by a similar port to the Framework 13 Gen1 laptop too.

Coreboot 25.12 is out today as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on free, open-source boot firmware is out with a new test release for Christmas.

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb published a blog post today outlining their work on bringing their Coreboot-downstream Dasharo to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T, a recent server motherboard for supporting Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids processors.

Over the past few months the open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and AMD's new openSIL silicon initialization library to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a broadly available motherboard that supports the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors. 3mdeb has been fairly successful in their quest and an early demonstrator for openSIL.

Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware.

Building off Coreboot 25.03 is now the availability of Coreboot 25.06 for further enhancing this open-source system firmware project that continues to see new hardware improvements -- predominantly for Google Chromebook devices but also more Intel platforms and other hardware -- as well as new capabilities to further rival proprietary BIOS solutions.

For those looking to replace their proprietary BIOS with the open-source Coreboot on a supported platform or are already doing so, Coreboot 25.03 is out today to provide the newest capabilities for this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.

The consulting firm 3mdeb's Dasharo open-source firmware distribution derived from Coreboot could soon feature improved integration under Linux thanks to a pending ACPI platform driver.

For those still running a 1st Generation Xeon Scalable "Skylake" era server, support for it within the open-source Coreboot firmware may continue to improve all these years later thanks to firmware consulting firm 9elements.

Following the rather bizarre blog post two weeks ago of laptop vendor MALIBAL suggesting not supporting Coreboot due to their frustrating experiences dealing with Coreboot consulting firms, the Coreboot project itself has now issued a response.

In a rather surprising post this morning, laptop vendor MALIBAL that offers both Linux and Windows systems is suggesting to not support the Coreboot project for open-source system firmware.

Coreboot 24.08 debuted on Monday night as the newest feature release for this open-source system firmware project that allows replacing the proprietary BIOS/firmware on many different platforms. With Coreboot 24.08 comes more than 900 patches from 130+ developers in continuing to support new motherboards and making other improvements.

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation is out with an interesting blog post by Google firmware engineer Subrata Banik around adapting the Coreboot-based Chrome AP Firmware for 64-bit booting. The transition to 64-bit booting is happening for the system firmware powering Chromebooks and other Chrome devices and is driven in part for Intel Panther Lake generation hardware.

Going back to 2022 we've seen work by Intel engineers on adding Meteor Lake SoC support to Coreboot while to date there hasn't been much in the way of actual Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptops with Coreboot as a replacement to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. But to be shown later today is one of the first laptop designs using these latest Intel mobile processors and running the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot.

Coreboot 24.05 is available today as the newest stable release of this open-source system firmware solution. With Coreboot 24.05 there is support for 25 more motherboards/platforms and an assortment of other improvements.

The Netherlands-based PC vendor NovaCustom that specializes in privacy/security minded hardware and user freedoms has announced their V54 and V56 laptops. These new laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoCs are self-proclaimed as the fastest Coreboot laptops in the world.

Succeeding last year's Coreboot 4.22 release is now a new release... Coreboot 24.02. This open-source system firmware project is now the latest to shift to a year-month versioning system. The newly-christened Coreboot 24.02 brings support for three new motherboards, a number of ACPI updates, and also pulls in the new GRUB 2.12 and other changes.

For those wanting to use an open-source Coreboot-based firmware on your desktop with modern hardware, a rare and leading option is 3mdeb's Coreboot-based "Dasharo" firmware on select MSI Z690/Z790 motherboards.

A new release of Coreboot is available today as the increasingly popular open-source system firmware solution that's used by Chromebooks, increasing hyperscaler / data center industry interest due to increased code transparency and security, System76 laptops, and more. Coreboot 4.22 is the new release and brings initial AMD OpenSIL code integration, 17 new motherboard ports, and more. Coreboot 4.22 will be succeeded next year by Coreboot 24.02.

Leah Rowe has announced the inaugural release of Canoeboot, what is another fork of Leah's own Libreboot that continues to serve as a free software minded fork of Coreboot.

Libreboot 20231021 was published for testing today as the newest Coreboot downstream focused on providing only fully free software support for system firmware with more stringent open-source requirements than Coreboot itself.

The firmware folks at 3mdeb have released Dasharo 1.1.2 for the MSI PRO Z690-A motherboard. In case you missed it, last year 3mdeb ported Coreboot/Dasharo to select MSI desktop motherboards that are readily available in retail channels and supporting the latest Intel processors. This started with the MSI PRO Z690-A and since extended to the Z790 series. 3mdeb has released an updated Dasharo build with some new features for replacing the proprietary BIOS on these motherboards.

Going along with AMD's work on AMD openSIL for open-sourcing the CPU silicon initialization code to ultimately replace AGESA in future hardware platforms, the initial EPYC "Genoa" code for Coreboot has been upstreamed along with the Onyx motherboard target.

Coreboot 4.21 is available this week as the newest tagged release for this open-source system BIOS/firmware solution. Coreboot 4.21 brings a number of new motherboard ports as well as various core improvements.

Upstreamed into the Coreboot Git repository this week is the ability to run on the MSI PRO Z790-P DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards for enjoying a latest-generation Intel desktop motherboard that is readily available as an alternative to using the proprietary BIOS implementations.

The amdfwtool utility living within the Coreboot repository for dealing with AMD platform firmware files has now added support for EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors.

The newest motherboard port to land in mainline Coreboot Git is for enabling the HP EliteBook 820 G2 laptop.

Just days after System76 upstreamed Intel Raptor Lake HX and their new Adder WS 3 laptop into Coreboot, three more of their laptops have now made their way to upstream Coreboot.

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing fully open-source system firmware without binary blobs has been quite active recently. There have been several new systems added recently, introducing support for shipping ROMs without CPU microcode included, and other changes. This latest wor has culminated into the Libreboot 20230625 release.

CPU microcode updates are commonly done in the name of security fixes and resolving functionality issues.. In recent years, CPU microcode updates have been a much more common -- and important -- occurrence. While all modern CPUs rely on microcode it's just a matter of whether the version used is baked into the hardware or an updated version loaded by the BIOS or OS at boot time, a "vocal minority" of users are unhappy with CPU microcode being included in Libreboot ROMs. Thus moving forward there will be alternative builds of Libreboot for different motherboards with the CPU microcode stripped out in the name of software freedom.

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.

Coreboot 4.20 has been released as the newest feature release for this project continuing to provide open-source system firmware/BIOS for Chromebooks, servers, and a range of laptops and desktops.

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on ensuring 100% open-source system firmware support without any lurking binary blobs is out this Sunday with a new feature release.

The Flashrom project that serves as an open-source firmware/ROM flashing utility not only for system BIOS/UEFI on motherboards but also capable of flashing firmware for various network / GPU / storage controller cards and other programmable devices has decided to effectively split into two.

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing fully open-source system firmware support has added support for the Dell Latitute E6400, a laptop from the Intel Core 2 Duo days that was popular with many businesses and can be found via various used channels for around $100.

The HP Elite 8200 was once popular and very common among workplaces and can still be found used/refurbished for a little more than $100 for this small form factor PC. Libreboot has now added support for the HP Elite 8200 as its newest desktop port for this Intel Sandy Bridge era system.

Libreboot is the downstream of Coreboot focused on having fully open-source / free software replacements to proprietary BIOS/firmware on x86 and ARM systems. Out today is Libreboot 20230413 as the latest step forward for the project.

AMD and their partners continue working on bringing up Coreboot for the Ryzen Mobile 7040 Series "Phoenix" support for those very interesting forthcoming mobile processors with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics.

More Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" code was merged this weekend into Coreboot as part of enabling this latest generation Intel server platform to enjoy this open-source system firmware solution when paired with the necessary Intel FSP binaries.

Libreboot 20230319 has been released as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing only pure open-source firmware replacements to proprietary BIOS/UEFI platforms compared to all the blobs permitted in upstream Coreboot.

This week TikTok-owner ByteDance hosted the CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium to talk up their open-source firmware work, showcase their industry partnerships, and more. One interesting takeaway is that thanks to the weight of ByteDance, Lenovo is now supporting LinuxBoot in some capacity.

TikTok owner Bytedance this week hosted their CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium in Beijing where they celebrated the launch of CloudFW 2.0 as they implement Coreboot to replace UEFI.

For those that happen to have an ASRock B75M-ITX in their collection or have just been looking for an old Intel Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge era system that can run the open-source Coreboot firmware, this mini-ITX desktop motherboard can run upstream Coreboot with the latest changes made this week.

Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76.

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds.