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Leah Rowe announced today a new version (20240225) of the Libreboot open-source and free BIOS/UEFI firmware alternative that adds support for more hardware, as well as other improvements.
Libreboot 20240225 is here about a month after the previous release and it’s yet another “testing” release that should only be used by those brave enough to replace their proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware with an Open Source one. A new stable Libreboot release will arrive around June or July 2024.
This release brings support for new mainboards including the HP EliteBook 8560w (includes MXM handling in SeaBIOS), Dell Latitude E5520, Dell Latitude E5530, Dell Latitude E6520, Dell Latitude E6420, Dell OptiPlex 9020/7020 SFF (and XE2 SFF), as well as Dell OptiPlex 9020/7020 MT (and XE2 MT), the latter being tested with both Haswell and Broadwell MRCs.
Another important change in the Libreboot 20240225 release that will improve hardware support in the future is the use of the flashprog software as a replacement for flashrom as a tool for identifying, reading, writing, verifying, and erasing flash chips. Libreboot uses flashprog to flash BIOS/UEFI firmware images on mainboards.
This release also updates the pico-serprog utility to support controlling multiple chip-selects, allowing you to set unused chip-selects high, which might come in handy when flashing externally on an Intel IFD-based system where the two flashes are connected, but without resistors between the shared data lines.
Last but not least, the developers have updated the U-Boot release script to support generating standalone U-Boot source archives (e.g. ./update release -m u-boot). Various issues were addressed as well, so check out the release notes for more details. Libreboot 20240225 is available for download from the official website.
Last updated 2 months ago
