Bootloader

Hardware
1

So, when will the bootloader be free - not very unimportant if you wish to compute freely, mind you!? Where is the www.fsf.org certification? And why did the FSF not give it??? I have been waiting for about a year, got myself a fabulously Free (and bloody fast!) Libreboot laptop at minifree.org in the meanwhile and puri.sm is still bloating about software freedom but doesn’t deliver… https://libreboot.org/faq/#librem

2

+1 :frowning:

3

Jezza makes a good point, however it’s understandable that having a truly free bootloader (Libreboot) will limit you to certain processors.

It would be great if you offered some products with free firmware. It’s not 100% correct to say “We will place respecting users’ rights to privacy, security, and freedom above all else.” when you’re sacrificing privacy, security, and freedom in order to have better hardware.

Product line looks good still–a much better alternative than most modern offerings.

4

Thanks for the feedback!

We are currently working on fully freeing the bootloader on the Librem 13 and you can follow the progress on our blog.
Youness, who is working on that makes a weekly update on his progress.

It won’t be Libreboot but instead, it will be based on our own modification of Coreboot. This way, we start from a working bootloader with blobs. From that, we remove/replace the blobs until it’s fully free. We first get rid of the binaries that are not required and we’ll do reverse engineering on the rest.

Youness already has a working version of coreboot on his Librem and is making amazing progress on removing the ME now. This is apparently the most tricky part, which, for some people is impossible to achieve on that CPU but we do believe that we can do it or, at least, fully deactivate it in a first step. You should get more info about this, from Youness, on the next post.

Stay tunned!

5

Francois,

Thank you for the feedback. That’s exciting to hear about the progress being made! Looking forward to when I can buy a modern PC that is 100% free.

6

Another idea, use Librecore By Raptor Engineering rather than of Libreboot
Librecore is a new Coreboot distribution with industrial standards.

http://librecore.info/

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librecore-Formation

7

Wait a moment…

it will be based on our own modification of Coreboot

this isn’t equal, one distribution?

why not make your on distro of Coreboot/Libreboot/Librecore? maybe… Purecore or Pureboot.
it sounds very good for me.

8

Carlos,

We have no plan for our own bootloader so I should rephrase that. It will be based on our own contribution to Coreboot. All the code we write will be made available to anyone and used by Coreboot as well if they wish.

9

Carlos, François already explained, but here is what we are plan to do, step-by-step:

  1. Port Coreboot to Librem 13 v1 (done);
  2. Remove ME and other binaries from our Coreboot (partially done);
  3. Release Coreboot as instalable package which will enable current Librem 13 v1 owners to install it;
  4. Steps 1-2 for Librem 13 v2;
  5. Steps 1-2-3 for Librem 15.

This is just a rough todo list, it’s possible that we are going to take some other course.