Really loving seeing more hardware supporting and shipping with open-source firmware.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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I imagine open source boot software being better than closed source (a real no brainer) but whats the difficulties with the open one? I'm not very versed in those very low level things.
The difficulty is getting closed source hardware manufacturers to adopt it.
All those blobs in there need to be reverse engineered. As there are not that many people doing it, this hardware is often a decade old
Not entirely the case anymore. Libreboot switched to a blob reduction policy in order to support more hardware. Hopefully this will bring things forward quite a bit over the next year.
Unless they support the newer platforms, it will remain a niche product. I've come to accept a compromise between binary blobs and FOSS bootloader, and the path that Libreboot has chosen is great for the community, so we'll wait and watch
Ah yes. Libreboo
It's to scare away proprietary firmware
AAH
If you want to install this please DO NOT USE THE CH341A programmer. That fucking shit has the internal control signals and data signals at 5V and the bios chips usually work at 3.3V or lower.
The CH341A is defective by design and the Chinese manufacturers don't care. There are fixes online, but still the chip works badly.
If you want to install libreboot, please use any other option given at Libreboot docs. I lost too many hours because of the fucking Chinese ch341a. Which I solved quickly with a pi pico board.
In any case do not use this guy's video as an example. The instructions of the video ARE WRONG and you may fry your bios. Don't be fooled by this youtuber confidence. Follow the docs.
I've installed it on a x220.
You can get a 3.3V adapter for the CH341A.
I did that my self (fixed the chip), the cables and everything shiped with it are trash.
I agree about the accessories, they're crap but cheap to replace with better ones. And then the programmer works very well.
Is this usable on any normie gamer mobos?
You can find the list of supported hardware here: https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/
There are some mobos, most of them are from prebuilt desktops.
I found only one "gamer": Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L from 2009, Socket 775, supports Core2Extreme, that was a beast 15 years ago.
But any other mobo can be used as a gaming mobo, usually they have standard ports and and newer ones tend to follow standard ATX sizes. Front IO ports usually use different configuration, but you can still use it in a case, possible that only the onoff button will work, no leds and reset, that's good enough
Thank you for a thorough reply.
Looks like this will need few years to mature. God willing it will support for more modern situations over next few years. I would deff consider my upgrade around mobo that supports FOSS BIOS.
I use a System76 laptop and I wish they took a stronger stance on freedom.
Who and how do you mean?
I wish System76 was focused on foss more.
I'm confused. What part of their software is not FOSS? They use CoreBoot for Bios, PopOS is based on Ubuntu and Cosmic is open source too. Do you mean that they still use Nvidia cards in some of their devices?
The CPUs require non-free software to boot and function. That's very hard to get around but it would be interesting if at some point they built a device based on ARM with a chip set that is free.
On top of that they use Intel WiFi which needs non-free software to work. Ubuntu, pop os and Fedora all ship proprietary software in the kernel to make it work. Admittedly the number of free WiFi cards are limited so maybe it was about tradeoffs.
Thanks for sharing this, I was completely unaware that those drivers were proprietary. Maybe I need to rethink my hardware choices then. Back to the drawing board.