SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Libreboot Sees First New Release In Nearly 5 Years, Supports More Old Motherboards
Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form.
Libreboot 20210522 allows more Intel GM45 / X3X era hardware to work with this fully open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware. New boards supported by this Libreboot release include the Acer G43T-AM3, Lenovo ThinkPad R500, Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and Intel G43T-AM3. Yeah, it's quite hard in 2021 to get excited about Socket 775 motherboards or 45nm Penryn laptops. Libreboot is largely limited to supporting these outdated platforms due to its focus on being fully open-source and not using any Intel FSP binaries, etc.
Previously: Replace your Proprietary BIOS with Libreboot
AMD to Consider Coreboot/Libreboot Support
Libreboot Applies to Rejoin GNU
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 25 2021, @09:42AM (8 children)
Am I the only one who immediately parsed this as lib reboot when reading the title? Which made me wonder why you't need a library just for rebooting.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:19AM
>> Which made me wonder why you't need a library just for rebooting.
Yeah, why not just use systemd-rebootctl instead? Oh shit, just gave Poettering another idea.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday May 25 2021, @01:12PM (1 child)
Nope, I do the same thing. It's been the standard for package managers to list libraries as libfoo, libbar, etc. for ages, so I think anybody that's used Linux for any length of time is inclined to look at it like that. For a long time it was safe to just skip over any packages starting with lib* when searching for software, and to only look at the lib* stuff if you wanted a library.
Speaking of weird libs, ome time after Oracle acquired Sun and all its assets a bunch of packages for some "reoffice" library started showing up, and they're all huge (like hundreds of MB huge). You'd have to be insane to include a library that bloated in your software!
(Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Tuesday May 25 2021, @05:25PM
Yep, I'm still trying to figure out what software uses "lib reoffice". ;-D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @07:16PM (2 children)
TBH, all this inversion of the r and the e in these names seems pretty dumb to me. If they just made it liber as god intended, it wouldn't be so hard to read. liberoffice, liberboot. You're not anywhere near as likely to missegment words when you don't insist on putting the e and r out of order. It's really one of the dumber bits about British English that they could never figure out how to fix the spellings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:24PM
Reminds me of that Office episode where Dunder-Mifflin was bought out by Sabre printers. Andy, who graduated "near the top of my class" from Cornell, writes a song to greet the new CEO. The problem is that he wrote it to rhyme, thought it was pronounced "SAB-RAY" and they practiced it like that, so they awkwardly slow down and correct the pronunciation to "SA-BER." So you have lines misrhyme like "You can get paper in white or Gray, when you buy from... SAY.. BER."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:44AM
It's a fucking French word, knobend.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 25 2021, @08:32PM (1 child)
Why have a library for
rebooting slightly faster when you can have an OS for it?! *rimshot*(systemD)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Redundant) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 25 2021, @08:35PM
Dammit, there I go commenting before scrolling all the way to the bottom again :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @09:45AM
Dick sawing tranny faggot.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 25 2021, @12:35PM (3 children)
An anecdote about old hardware.
I'm still using computers that are between 10 and 15 years old. One of them, with a 65nm CPU, Linux 2.6.33 shut down just fine. Somewhere between that version and 3.0, shutdown stopped powering off that computer reliably. The system would shut down, and then I'd have to hold the power button for 4 seconds. Perhaps 10% of the time, the kernel does power off, the rest of the time I have to do it. I don't know what changed in the kernel, but what seems most likely is that the kernel maintainers removed code that works around a bug in that system's BIOS or firmware.
Reason I suspect something like that is what I learned from an even older computer, with a Pentium IV. Neither Linux nor FreeBSD could use the DVD/CD burner reliably. Curiously, the CD would boot and reading it worked just fine, but then it would fail to read. How could it work and then stop working? With a lot of experimenting, I nailed down the problem. I thought at first it was the DVD burner, that Linux had removed support for that model. I learned that 2.6.25 is the last kernel that could reliably use that optical drive. A boot CD with 2.6.26 did sort of work still, by treating the drive as hdc, rather than sdc. 2.6.27, nope, didn't work at all. It turned out the drive wasn't the problem at all. The problem was that when I first built that computer, I had used a 40 wire PATA cable for the optical drive, while the hard drive got the 80 wire cable. (I didn't have enough 80 wire cables to go 80 wire everywhere, and thought the optical drive, being slower, was the obvious choice for the 40 wire cable.) I'd long ago forgotten all about PATA cables, forgotten that there was this improvement from 40 to 80 wire, as PATA has long since been replaced by SATA. (If you're curious, the extra wires aren't actually connected to anything. What they do is simply rest between the 40 wires, and thereby cut down the interference the 40 wires that are in use cause with each other.) Anyway, 2.6.25 will announce, in the logs, that it has detected a 40 wire cable, reduce the transfer speed accordingly, and everything just works. 2.6.27 won't say anything about having detected a 40 wire cable, try to use the connection at the full speed that the 80 wire cable can support, and it won't work. The solution I adopted was to dig up another 80 wire cable. That worked, and Linux 4.x and 5.x, and FreeBSD, were suddenly able to handle that old DVD/CD drive just fine.
So why did the kernel maintainers take that little bit of 40 wire detection code out of the kernel? They do that. They will quietly take out things that they believe no one ever uses any more. The noisiest removal was kicking out the 386 code. Sometime during Linux 3.x, support for the 386 was dropped. Now a 486 is the minimum x86 CPU.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @04:37PM (2 children)
This is wrong. All 40 extra wires are (or rather, should be) connected to one or more of the ground pins inside the connectors. If the additional wires are not electrically connected at both ends the cables will not serve their intended purpose. Specialized connectors were made for this.
The 80-wire cable solves a specific problem with the IDE cable design without altering the pinout: all 16 data lines are clustered together in the ribbon. As speeds on these cables increase this turns out to be a big problem for the data signals in the middle of this cluster. Take for example pin 10 (data bit 11). The closest ground pin is pin 2 (with pin 19 being the next closest). In a normal 40-wire ribbon cable, all the other 15 data signals are physically located directly between this wire and the nearest ground wires with half on either side.
The issue is that as frequencies increase, the return current from this middle signal will not actually travel on the ground wires: they are too far away. The high frequency return current will essentially all travel along the adjacent signal wires. This is bad for signal integrity and it is bad for EMI. This is only solved by creating an even lower inductance path for the return current, which the 80-conductor cable accomplishes by inserting a dedicated ground wire adjacent to every single other wire in the cable.
These extra wires can only serve as a low inductance the return path if they are electrically connected at both ends (for a normal IDE cable with two device connections, that means they are electrically connected inside all three connectors).
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 25 2021, @09:08PM (1 child)
Thank you for the correction. I had thought the extra wires were just there as a shield, not as a ground. Explains why it's 80 wire, and not 79 or 81 wire. Also explains how the connector can still be only 40 pin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:17AM
I imagine the choice of 80 wires is more a practical choice than anything else. For example, presumably there is no real point in adding an extra ground wire between pins 1 (reset) and 2 (ground). These wires are right next to each other with nothing between them so there is unlikely to be problems. And the other side of the cable already has several ground wires interspersed with various (mostly non-critical) signals, with nothing as obviously horrible as the data lines.
The practicality just comes from "hey, we can just use off the shelf 0.635mm ribbon cable and off the shelf tools to terminate into special connectors, then we only need to design/build those connectors and there's barely any change to manufacture the cable assemblies". Then the geometry of ribbon cables basically makes 80 conductors the only option -- 79 would presumably do just fine but the ribbon would be off-center and the factory probably wouldn't like it as much (I have seen ribbon cables terminated this way, however).
As an aside, there was a brief period when round IDE cables were available. I doubt any of these actually had 80 wires since the point of these cables was to have a "clean" look in your case, but I suspect they would nevertheless perform quite well (despite the ATA standards only specifying the use of ribbon cables) as the round design inherently brings everything physically closer together.
(Score: 3, Touché) by drussell on Tuesday May 25 2021, @01:27PM (3 children)
So, they've managed to add support for a handful of "new" old devices, while the whole list of all the AMD id 10h/15h boards that used to be supported and work just fine have been removed with no real plan to ever get them supported again.
Genius.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @03:42PM (2 children)
Not sure what you're talking about. Libreboot has only ever supported a very short list of boards. Prior to this release, on the list of libreboot-supported boards [archive.org] there are just 3 entries that would count as "AMD id 10h/15h boards".
The new list [libreboot.org] appears to have exactly the same list of "AMD id 10h/15h boards".
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday May 28 2021, @05:41PM
The boards in question were removed way back in the 4.11 release.
Prior to 4.11, the following were all supported:
advansus/a785e-i
amd/bimini_fam10
amd/mahogany_fam10
amd/serengeti_cheetah_fam10
amd/tilapia_fam10
asus/m4a785-m
asus/m4a785t-m
asus/m4a78-em
asus/m5a88-v
avalue/eax-785e
gigabyte/ma785gm
gigabyte/ma785gmt
gigabyte/ma78gm
hp/dl165_g6_fam10
iei/kino-780am2-fam10
jetway/pa78vm5
msi/ms9652_fam10
supermicro/h8dmr_fam10
supermicro/h8qme_fam10
supermicro/h8scm_fam10
tyan/s2912_fam10
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday May 28 2021, @05:46PM
Oops, I forgot the link to the "TODO" page:
https://libreboot.org/tasks/#amd-fam10h-fam15h [libreboot.org]
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @02:17PM
Inquiring minds want to know what sort of a faggot would script an automated deletion for any message containing those three words?
Somebody has something to hide.
Somebody did something they are ashamed of.
Someone doesn't have the courage of their convictions.
I think you should change the site to "SoylentJews".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @03:29PM (13 children)
One would think there would be enough of us paranoids that we could convince Intel or AMD to sell a batch of processors with the fuse bits clear and sufficient documentation for Libreboot to work. The entity that bought the lot of unlocked chips could make a decent markup selling them paired with boards running Libreboot, probably enough to fund development.
But it doesn't happen.
One would think we could get ONE Arm phone, tablet, etc. similarly unlocked. Other than Pinephone and Librem, both selling seriously obsolete chips, zero vendors have stepped into an obvious market niche.
Almost like an invisible hand around the throat of the marketplace. Somebody really likes their built in backdoor into every PC and server.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @03:58PM (7 children)
POWER9 [raptorcs.com] is an option, although the price point is obviously out of reach for many people. Raptor Engineering actually did the work to implement several of the boards currently supported by libreboot.
Unfortunately Leah seems very good at pissing off everyone who tries to work with her, which does not inspire confidence in the long-term future of libreboot as a project. Getting this release out helps to restore that confidence. I wish her the best of luck.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @07:53PM (5 children)
Leah Rowe actually signed the pro-Stallman open letter over on github when that became a thing. I had to do a double-take, but despite that rather public controversy over the FSF/GNU trans employee who got fired, she's come out backing him over lambasting him. Thought that as an interesting bit of trivia for anyone hear who hadn't noticed it before.
With that said, I think open firmware in the x86 ecosystem as well as peripheral devices is effectively dead, and show of starting up an entirely new technology base we only have less and less security and anonymity to look forward to in our hardware going forward. Everything is leaking UUID or device serial numbers now so without operating systems intentionally designed to sanitize that information and assurances that backdoor 'identification instructions' aren't included, there is no way to have user-trustable hardware using modern systems anymore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 25 2021, @09:44PM (4 children)
On that note, I just received yet another menacing "copyright infringement" notice today. Said they've continued to receive complaints. My ISP put my account on "quarantine", as if a few accusations of piracy is grounds for suspecting my computers might be "sick". Forced me to click on a button to acknowledge that I had received the warning, before restoring service. I thought at first it was a technical problem, and am angry to learn it is actually a political problem.
I am not sure what to do about it. Talking to the ISP seems totally pointless. Their warning was packed with doublespeak, of which that word "quarantine" is an example. I can change to a different ISP. Perhaps that would clear the record. Ideally, I'd like to see ended permanently all pretensions that these "owners" think entitles them to monitor and accuse people of piracy, and think gives them the right and moral justification to shut down Internet service. We know their fondest wish is that the entire Internet be shut down. I'd like to see copyright ended instead.
I am also feeling considerable hesitance about buying a newer car. I don't want my car to spy on and monitor me, nor record my every move. Airline pilots live with black boxes, but commuters shouldn't have to, not until a lot of protections are in place. I can imagine a scenario in which a police officer pulls me over, and asks "Do you know how fast you were going?" and my car responds, "Yes, officer, I gave him a verbal warning that he was exceeding the speed limit by 11 mph" and, bam! Speeding ticket! Then it might come out later that my car was mistaken about what the current speed limit was, and that the cop knew I wasn't speeding but had tried that question just to fish for an admission of guilt and had actually pulled me over for something else, a burnt out taillight or some such. But it wouldn't matter, it'd be after the fact. I'd operate on that traitorous car to disable that crap before I drove it again. How far back do you have to go to escape self-monitoring cars? 1980s? Even older than that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:23AM (1 child)
Most any car with an airbag (which fires based on an accelerometer signal) will have some "black box" capability that can be read by someone (often only the airbag controller manufacturer, iirc).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:25AM
A number of people sued manufacturers because their airbags fired improperly or other safety equipment malfunctioned. In that situation, it wasn't even he-said/she-said but the driver claimed one thing and it was next to impossible to prove they didn't with the closest being experts arguing both ways. Not surprising the manufacturers voluntarily started to add them to cars.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:13AM (1 child)
Why bother with the cop and the ticket... just have the black box report you directly, and disable the car until you pay the fine!
Had my ISP do something similar ... told me I'd been naughty for downloading something I'd never even heard of.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:37AM
We had something like that at the office. IT got a warning that a certain IP of ours was seeding a ton of torrents. We looked through the machines and all the logs to no avail. Finally, we asked which of our addresses it was that was being bad, to try and narrow down the machine that could have caused the problem. So they reply that it is an IP address that we are not assigned statically or dynamically. That was a real headscratcher for ourselves and the person on their side that responded to our escalation of the claim. That particular address is in their AS but wasn't assigned to anyone at the time the complaint covered. Apparently, according to them, that isn't uncommon because they routinely get complaints for all sorts of situations where it would be impossible for that address or customer to be infringing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @08:10PM
It's a dude, man!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 25 2021, @05:46PM (3 children)
Heck, seems like the "obsolete" phones don't sell all that well, you really think increasing the price dramatically would improve the situation?
Most of the "paranoids" I know care far more about security than the latest and greatest features and performance, to the point that using "obsolete" hardware is hardly even a concern in comparison. I mean, what do you need the latest and greatest phone for? To be able to run the latest apps with who knows how much spyware built in?
I seriously doubt there's that many "slightly paranoids" out there that would rather use new hardware than secure hardware, but would be willing to pay the substantial premium for new, secure hardware. (There's always a substantial premium for niche hardware, economies of scale an all that)
The only potential large-scale clients I can think of would be national governments, security agencies, etc. And seeing how they're the very ones suspected of getting back doors, etc. installed in the first place, it'd look incredibly suspicious if they went out of their way to avoid that hardware. To the point that they'd probably lose a substantial amount of their presumed surveillance capacity over their most "interesting" targets, most of whom are likely at least mildly paranoid.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @09:08PM (1 child)
Well if no new product becomes available, what is a barely usable ten year old PC will soon be a twenty year old one. We gotta find a way or they win. They can just wait us out, wait for the old hardware to fail.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:33AM
Of course if that's "their" goal, then they're hardy likely to make it easy for us to produce open hardware, are they? Especially when those cutting-edge features are what gives them their market edge.
My impression is that the open hardware folks pretty much work on a combination of
- reverse engineering control of hardware-level features of old hardware, which will always lag well behind the proprietary stuff since reverse engineering undocumented hardware is usually a major undertaking, and
- using newly manufactured versions of old hardware that's been well documented through either reverse engineering, or an increase in documentation as hardware manufacturers release more documentation to increase the value of old chips for niche products.
Which is pretty much exactly what you would expect. The open hardware people could theoretically develop their own version of well-documented cutting-edge hardware, but doing so costs a lot of money, which is usually in short supply. And invites competition from cheap clones developed from well-documented designs, which further shortens the money supply for future projects.
Basically, the poor documentation of proprietary designs seems to emerge as a natural consequence of the economic system we operate in, no great conspiracy needed. The chip developers have mostly learned well from the PC Clone Wars, and now do their best to keep the makers of cheap clone hardware as far behind as possible. That the rest of us lose out as a side effect is no concern of theirs. And if the situation also opens the door (so to speak...) for secretly adding "features" to cater to shadowy organizations? Well I'm sure they're all as pure as driven snow and would never consider actually doing such a thing. They're Capitalists after all, shining beacons of virtue and hope...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:54AM
> the latest and greatest features
As long I can turn them off, I'm happy to have these.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:59AM
AC writes: "One would think there would be enough of us paranoids that we could convince Intel or AMD to sell a batch of processors... But it doesn't happen."
It sort of did. And the bunch of paranoids work at the NSA. It is called the High Assurance Platform (HAP) and you can read about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#%22High_Assurance_Platform%22_mode [wikipedia.org] and https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-now-you-too-can-disable-intel-me-backdoor-thanks-to-the-nsa.html [csoonline.com] and https://www.theregister.com/2017/08/29/intel_management_engine_can_be_disabled/ [theregister.com]
But it does not disable all of IME :-(
"Almost like an invisible hand around the throat of the marketplace. Somebody really likes their built in backdoor into every PC and server."
And that invisible hand could be the same people who wanted the High Assurance Platform ;-)