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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 Libreboot is largely limited to supporting these outdated platforms due to its focus on being fully open-source and not using any Intel FSP binaries, etc.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: 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...