Jobs that Need Doing in the Libreboot Project

NOTE: Libreboot standardises on flashprog now, as of 27 January 2024, which is a fork of flashrom. If you want to work on some of these yourself, patches are always welcome! Please read the code review page, which provides guidance on how to submit patches, and it describes the Libreboot project infrastructure. You may also benefit from assimilating all knowledge contained in the lbmk maintenance manual. Although coreboot is not mentioned (the context is TF-A), this could be added to coreboot. Yes. We already provide other non-coreboot firmware, such as the serprog images. We even integrate U-Boot, albeit as a coreboot payload with some init steps skipped in U-Boot (handled by coreboot). It is essentially an analog of coreboot; coreboot even uses parts of this, on some boards. Libreboot’s build system design is already extremely efficient. One of the reasons for this is auditing. The build system is regularly audited. In this context, that means reading the code to check for quality, pre-emptively fix bugs and generally think about the design of the project.

Code equals bugs, so less code yields fewer bugs. Auditing can often be pedantic, and seem petty. You might commit a patch that reduces the sloccount by only 1 line, maybe 3, but they all add up. Merge PDF equals bugs, so fewer lines of code will cause fewer bugs. Any board port is interesting. These are just a few that happened to be noticed at a given time. The list below is by no means complete! Libreboot can support any board from coreboot, in principle. It would also be feasible to integrate other (libre) boot firmware, if desirable. Dasharo supports several more motherboards that aren’t in coreboot proper. Dasharo’s version is much more up to date and more reliable with raminit. These are interesting; the T431s in particular has soldered RAM, so we’d need to take care of SPDs (not done automatically yet, in coreboot). The schematics will show GPIO straps that could be used to glean which SPD data is correct, if we wanted to scan it automatically at boot time (we’d have to include SPD data for all known modules, it might be possible to extract it from vendor updates, otherwise we’d have to dump it from multiple variants of the same machine).

Both are supported by coreboot. The 840/850 G2 may have an AMD® Radeon™ R7 M260X gpu and 14/15u would have an AMD® FirePro™ M4170 gpu added, which would became useless using libreboot. Everything else (except the battery status and extra gpus) shall work as it is on the elitebook 820 g2. Not yet supported, but interesting for the project. Scan coreboot code for ICH9/ICH10 systems, or boards with x4x/gm45 based northbridges. Many of these can boot blobless. Also E6440 (Haswell machine) - also E6540, 5540, E5440, E3540, E3440, E7440, and E7240 also - Nicholas says only the E6x40 models here have socked CPUs. The rest are soldered. These typically use MEC5045 or compatible EC. Some may use MEC5035. SuperIO: at least M6500 is known to use ECE5028. I have a bunch of these Dells at my lab, they are high priority for porting because they would be easily flashable. E5450 uses MEC5085, currently untested for dell-flash-unlock.

Non-E models don’t have the MEC ECs. The E models have MEC5085. Nicholas isn’t sure whether these have bootguard. TODO: test, and also test with dell-flash-unlock. Haswell latitude, works with dell-flash-unlock, uses MEC5055 EC. Documentation is included with that patch. It should be possible to re-use the existing MRC extraction logic. It will have to be backported to the branch used for libremrc in lbmk. NOTE: Iru Cai is the person working on this. Also M6800, though no port is available yet. Another haswell machine. However, according to Nicholas Chin, at least on 1 January 2024, this patch (on patchset 4), there were problems with code quality and libgfxinit didn’t work yet - also, the ACPI code seemed to be a dump of the vendor, which is of low quality and likely not suitable for entry into coreboot due to copyright reasons. This port is worth looking at. When the issues are fixed, this will make a fine addition to lbmk.