Saw this a bit ago but didn’t think to post about it
To be clear, this doesn’t mean coreboot is available now and what is working for devs includes quite a few binary blobs. It’s still progress though and good to see.
It’s been 5 months but you did ask me to inform you of anything happening @[email protected]
Another link from that article shares more info: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Framework-13-AMD-Coreboot-WIP
More info tends to be posted here: https://community.frame.work/t/responded-coreboot-on-the-framework-laptop/791/428
Can someone fill me in on the advantages coreboot will bring to the table? Is this something that’s distro-agnostic?
It should be distro agnostic, yes. It’s a bios replacement so once it hands off to the OS it should be chill
The reason why many people like coreboot is ownership over your system. The codes freely available to you, what it does is known, and this it’s harder to backdoor.
As for functionality, by my understanding, this allows for updates way past what manufacturers are willing to support. Making older hardware much more secure.
Other than support for older systems and peace of mind there’s not anything I’d know myself. It may be able to allow features that the bios doesn’t allow but the hardware supports as well but I don’t have any examples
I’ll admit, I’m a paranoid man, so peace of mind and ownership over my system is the main allure. Also, I hate branding, and love to remove it where possible. Coreboot allows this
Something that frustrates me is the the bios manufacturers tend to do the minimum required.
This means that your notebook could grow older and stop getting bugfix updates.
The bios are usually tailored for Windows and thus break UEFI standards like windows.
This requires “quirks” in Linux to try to make ACPI for correctly.
Coreboot is appealing to me because it gives hope that well have properly designed firmware, and prompt bugfixes, on Laptops one day.