How to downgrade from latest coreboot?

Firmware Coreboot
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Unfortunately I can’t ever win with this Librem Mini V2. Ever since day 1 its been problem after problem doing the most basic tasks, like dual booting OS’s, missing drives upon reboot, HDMI display issues, not waking from standby, etc., etc…
Now I made the mistake of upgrading to the latest coreboot and the display (such as GRUB, post Librem splashscreen) is microscopic on my 4k monitor and is impossible to read without my face inches from the screen. That and I can no longer load Windows as it stalls (please do not comment about using Windows on this device - I know its not supported, but it was working with prior firmware and I need it on rare occasions).
So, where are the instructions to downgrade to a previous firmware? All I can find are upgrade instructions.
Regards

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@jonathon.hall

You can try swapping to PureBoot (Basic) for a temporary workaround.

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I could be wrong but I think the instructions are not specific to whether it is an “upgrade” or a “downgrade”. Either way you are just flashing the firmware from a file. That presumes of course that you did download the previous version. You would probably want to mention what version you have just downloaded and flashed, and what version you had previously, if you know.

I don’t think Windows can handle that.

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Right, PureBoot does not support Windows. That being said, it should be fine with Linux distributions within the dual boot configuration.

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@Kennedy Thanks for the report, sorry about your rough experience. You can revert to the prior release (instructions below), but I’d suggest configuring GRUB for a high resolution display so you can keep the S3 resume fixes that went into the latest release. I would like to see if there is a way to improve this by default for the next firmware release.

To do that:

  1. Generate a high-resolution font: sudo grub-mkfont -s 30 -o /boot/hires.pf2 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
  2. Edit /etc/default/grub (sudo nano /etc/default/grub or editor of your choice), add the following lines after GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX:
    • GRUB_GFXMODE="3840x2160@60,auto"
    • GRUB_FONT="/boot/hires.pf2"
  3. Run sudo update-grub.

You’ll get a high resolution GRUB menu with a large font. You can adjust the size if you want, re-run #1 and change -s 30 to the size of your choice.

If you’d rather revert to the prior release instead, follow the usual instructions with an older coreboot_util.sh from the release you want.

For 4.21-Purism-4:

mkdir ~/updates
cd ~/updates
wget https://source.puri.sm/firmware/utility/-/raw/95a025143233a5b7b6aa4b8a2cbf0a8605367b5d/coreboot_util.sh
sudo bash coreboot_util.sh

I appreciate your report. I’ve made a lot of improvements in firmware for many of the issues you’ve encountered, but I know some of them remain, and getting reports from customers is very helpful feedback. Missing drives after reboot was improved in 4.21-Purism-4. There have been many improvements for display issues, the last change to remove the VGA BIOS helped with many displays that could not handle many mode switches during boot that GRUB was causing. The last resume from standby issue was addressed in 4.21-Purism-4. But if any of those do persist for you on the latest releases, I’d appreciate any context or information about your setup that you can offer so I can reproduce and fix those issues.

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