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 Libreboot is largely limited to supporting these outdated platforms due to its focus on being fully open-source and not using any Intel FSP binaries, etc.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