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UK based Linux hardware vendor StarLabs announced today the availability of the latest Coreboot 5 open-source firmware for its Star LabTop Mk III and Star LabTop Mk IV Linux-powered laptops.
Star Labs is one of the Linux hardware vendors that’s very serious about offering open hardware to their customers, and the company recently unveiled the fact that they plan to completely replace the proprietary AMI firmware with the well-known Coreboot open-source firmware.
The Linux hardware company started adding Coreboot support to its Linux laptops since early March 2021, starting with the Star LabTop Mk IV and Star LabTop Mk III models, and it also released a Coreboot Configurator utility a month later to make it easier to change various Coreboot settings.
Now, StarLabs works hard to bring support for capsule updates, as well as the ability to disable wireless, webcam and microphone in the Coreboot firmware and the Coreboot Configurator utility respectively, with the ultimate goal to completely replace the AMI firmware, which still ships as default firmware for its Linux laptop offerings.
“Moving forward, the intention is to bring our coreboot configuration up to the point where the comparison against AMI is only a list of positives. In this case, we would cease development of the AMI platform and focus solely on coreboot,” said StarLabs.
Until then, StarLabs recently added support for the latest Coreboot 5 open-source firmware to its Star LabTop Mk III and Mk IV laptops. The new Coreboot release promises improved battery ACPI, a new CMOS option to enable Intel Management Engine (ME), and removes the delay for charger to connect or disconnect.
Owners of the Star LabTop Mk III and LapTop Mk IV Linux laptops using the Coreboot open-source firmware can now update it to version 5 by installing the updates from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). More details on how to do that on various GNU/Linux distributions can be found here.
Last updated 3 years ago
