Libreboot project documentation

Information about this release can be found at release.html. Always check libreboot.org for updates.

What is libreboot?

How do I know what version I'm running?

Table of contents

About the libreboot project

Libreboot is a coreboot distribution (distro) with proprietary software removed, intended to be a free (libre) 'BIOS' replacement for your computer. The project is aimed at users, attempting to make coreboot as easy to use as possible. Read the full Free Software definition.

Libreboot also has many practical advantages over proprietary boot firmware, such as faster boot speeds and better security. You can install GNU/Linux with encrypted /boot/, verify GPG signatures on your kernel, run a full operating system directly from the flash chip (planned for a future release), and more.

The libreboot project has three main goals:

Libreboot is a coreboot distribution, not a coreboot fork

Libreboot is not a fork of coreboot. Every so often, the project re-based on the latest version of coreboot, with the number of custom patches in use minimized.

All new coreboot development should be done in coreboot (upstream), not libreboot! Libreboot is about deblobbing and packaging coreboot in a user-friendly way, where most work is already done for the user.

For example, if you wanted to add a new board to libreboot, you should add it to coreboot first. Libreboot will automatically receive your code at a later date, when it updates itself.

The deblobbed coreboot tree used in libreboot is referred to as coreboot-libre, to distinguish it as a component of libreboot.

Libreboot is a 'stable' version of coreboot

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How do I know what version I'm running?

If you are at least 127 commits after release 20150518 (commit message build/roms/helper: add version information to CBFS) (or you have any upstream stable release of libreboot after 20150518), then you can press C at the GRUB console, and use this command to find out what version of libreboot you have:
cat (cbfsdisk)/lbversion
This will also work on non-release images, built from the git repository. A file named version will also be included in the archives that you downloaded (if you are using release archives).

If it exists, you can also extract this lbversion file by using the cbfstool utility which libreboot includes, from a ROM image that you either dumped or haven't flashed yet. In GNU/Linux, run cbfstool on your ROM image (libreboot.rom, in this example):
$ ./cbfstool libreboot.rom extract -n lbversion -f lbversion
You will now have a file, named lbversion, which you can read in whatever programme it is that you use for reading/writing text files.

For git, it's easy. Just check the git log.

For releases on or below 20150518, or snapshots generated from the git repository below 127 commits after 20150518, you can find a file named commitid inside the archives. If you are using pre-built ROM images from the libreboot project, you can press C in GRUB for access to the terminal, and then run this command:
lscoreboot
You may find a date in here, detailing when that ROM image was built. For pre-built images distributed by the libreboot project, this is a rough approximation of what version you have, because the version numbers are dated, and the release archives are typically built on the same day as the release; you can correlate that with the release information in release.html.

You can also check the documentation that came with your archives, and in docs/release.html will be the information about the version of libreboot that you are using.

Generally speaking, it is advisable to use the latest version of libreboot.

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Francis Rowe <info@gluglug.org.uk>
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License and all future versions. A copy of the license can be found at cc-by-sa-4.txt.

This document is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See cc-by-sa-4.txt for more information.