Libreboot 20230319 has been released. The libreboot project offers a free BIOS/UEFI firmware replacement that boots specific Intel/AMD x86 and ARM targets.

Libreboot 20230319 released!

This release was build-tested on Debian Sid, as of 18 March 2023. Your mileage may vary, with other distros. Refer to Libreboot documentation.

Work done since last release

For more detailed change logs, look at the Git repository. This is a summary of changes.

Brief overview of changes

I’ve been very busy these last couple months, so there have been less changes in Libreboot lately. I’m expecting to have a lot more time throughout the coming summer, which I plan to make full use of for the next Libreboot release.

The changes can be summarised, thus:

• LIBRE raminit code now available, on Haswell boards (ThinkPad T440p and ThinkPad W541). This is using patches from Angel Pons (hell on coreboot IRC), that are currently still in review on coreboot master. The old configs that use mrc.bin for raminit are still available aswell, so this release contains ROMs with libre raminit and ROMs with blob raminit. The reasons are explained below.
• FIXED S3 suspend/resume on Haswell (T440p/W541) - but only on configs that use mrc.bin. The images with libre MRC still have broken S3. S3 suspend/resume is what people refer to as sleep mode and wake from sleep.
• Force console display mode in GRUB: This corresponds to the setting GRUB_TERMINAL=console that you might find in /etc/default/grub on a Linux machine. In Libreboot, switching VGA/text modes is unsupported, it’s stuck in one mode until Linux/BSD Kernel Mode Setting takes over. With this change to GRUB, GRUB’s VGA mode switching is disabled. This might make a few Linux distro installer menus work a bit nicer.
• New ports: Lenovo T530 and W530 thinkpads added.
• Bump coreboot revision: February 2023 revision for most x86 boards, including Haswell (T440p/W541) when mrc.bin is in use; Haswell (T440p/W541) setups that don’t use mrc.bin (and instead use Angel`s libre replacement code), it’s currently based on coreboot from mid-2022 because that’s what Angel’s as yet unmerged patches are based on (relative to coreboot’s master branch)
• Bump GRUB revision: February 2023 revision now, on all boards.
• Bump SeaBIOS revision: February 2023 revision now, on all boards.
• grub.cfg: 5 seconds boot delay, instead of 10 seconds.
• GM45 thinkpads: default to 256MB VRAM instead, which is more stable than the previous setting of 352MB. Many reports from users indicated performance issues when the 352MB config was used.
• Stricter handling of exit status in lbmk. More errors result in a hard exit than before, preventing the build process from erroneously continuing.
• Fixed fault checks in the Libreboot build system, when checking which coreboot utilities are needed (e.g. cbfstool, ifdtool)
• util/nvmutil: Massively re-factored the codebase, making it more efficient and correct.

Libreboot – Libreboot 20230319 released!