Libreboot project documentation

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

About the libreboot project

Libreboot originally began during December 2013, as a commercial effort by Gluglug to achieve RYF endorsement for a modified ThinkPad X60 (the first system to ever be added to libreboot).

Back then, the name libreboot didn't exist; the project was nameless, referring to itself as a deblobbed version of coreboot. The project named itself libreboot at some point during early 2014, and has since rapidly expanded to support more hardware and become more user-friendly.

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 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:

Recommend and distribute only free software. Coreboot distributes certain pieces of proprietary software which is needed on some systems. Examples can include things like CPU microcode updates, memory initialization blobs and so on. The coreboot project sometimes recommends adding more blobs which it does not distribute, such as the Video BIOS or Intel's Management Engine. However, a lot of dedicated and talented individuals in coreboot work hard to replace these blobs whenever possible.
Support as much hardware as possible! Libreboot supports less hardware than coreboot, because most systems from coreboot still require certain proprietary software to work properly. Libreboot is an attempt to support as much hardware as possible, without any proprietary software.
Make coreboot easy to use. Coreboot is notoriously difficult to install, due to an overall lack of user-focussed documentation and support. Most people will simply give up before attempting to install coreboot.

Libreboot attempts to bridge this divide, making sure that everything from building to installing coreboot is automated, as much as is feasibly possible. Secondly, the project produces documentation aimed at non-technical users. Thirdly, the project attempts to provide excellent user support via mailing lists and IRC.

Libreboot already comes with a payload (GRUB), flashrom and other needed parts. Everything is fully integrated, in a way where most of the complicated steps that are otherwise required, are instead done for the user in advance.

You can download ROM images for your libreboot system and install them, without having to build anything from source. The build system is also fully automated, so building from source is easy if you wanted to do that (for whatever reason).

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

Coreboot uses the rolling release model, which means that it is not guaranteed to be stable, or to even work at all on a given day. Coreboot does have a strict code review process, but being such a large project with so many contributors, regressions are always possible.
Libreboot freezes on a particular revision of coreboot, making sure that everything works properly, making fixes on top of that and repeating this during each subsequent update to a later version of coreboot. By doing this, it provides a stronger guarantee to the user that the firmware will be reliable, and not break their system.

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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 (the version string is automatically generated, using git describe --tags HEAD), 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.