The Libreboot project announced today the general availability of a new Libreboot release, version 20240126, which introduces support for new hardware, as well as several improvements and new features.
After more than two and a half months in the works, Libreboot 20240126 is here to introduce support for new mainboards including Dell Latitude E6530, HP EliteBook 820 G2, HP Compaq Elite 8300 CMT, HP EliteBook 8460p, and the eDP variant of the Lenovo ThinkPad X220.
This release also introduces support for the GRUB 2.12 bootloader, as well as GRUB support for EFI system partition by implementing the ability for Libreboot’s GRUB payload to scan the GRUB configuration file from EFI/ directories. In addition to scanning GRUB configs, it can also scan directly for EXTLINUX and SYSLINUX configs.
“The above change pertaining to ESP has also been applied to booting of installers (e.g. USB media),” explains developer Leah Rowe. “Syslinux/Extlinux/GRUB config scanning has been merged together there, so now a lot more distro installers should boot automatically, without manual tweaking/intervention from the user.”
Among other noteworthy changes, the Libreboot 20240126 release further optimizes the build system both in terms of code size and performance, updates to a newer Coreboot revision from January 2024, adds support for setting xarch for U-Boot, and adds the ability to re-use crossgcc builds across Coreboot trees.
On top of that, it updates the dependencies config for Arch Linux packages, greatly simplifies the include/git.sh script to handle the downloading of sources, adds support for generic CMake handling, unifies script/update/trees and script/build/grub, and fixes many bugs. For more details, check out the release announcement page.
Libreboot is an open-source and free BIOS/UEFI replacement with an emphasis on security, based on Coreboot and designed for x86 and ARM machines. It comes with support for the GRUB and SeaBIOS Coreboot payloads and an automated build system for the configuration and installation of Coreboot ROM images.
Libreboot 20240126 is available for download right now from the official website.
Last updated 6 hours ago