GNU Libreboot

We are working to make libreboot eligible to be added to the GNU system, and call on the community to help with this effort. Back to home page

Firstly, the git repositories (for development) can be found on the git page.

Libreboot has been 100% philosophically compatible with GNU, from the day the project was founded (our goal is identical to GNU, and our philosophy is identical to the one held by that project), but there are some technical issues with it that make it incompatible with GNU at present.

So far, we have the following tasks to complete (there may be other tasks):

• Convert the documentation to texinfo - partially complete. The docs have been converted using pandoc, but now require a serious cleanup. We wish to merge these into 1 documentation file (manual) in texinfo file. The texinfo manual itself is an example of how we would like to implement the new libreboot documentation. One file, but we will distribute it separated into separate pages/sections, and in other formats in addition to HTML. (info, PDF, etc). The current live documentation on the libreboot website is the old pre-conversion documentation, written in raw HTML. To encourage the transition, we are now refusing all new documentation submissions that are not in texinfo format.
  • Texinfo is the official documentation format, for all GNU software.
  • GNU Emacs has decent integration for editing Texinfo documents. See Texinfo mode. We should promote use of Emacs (the lead develop of libreboot is attempting to learn it). It's also very useful in general. We could document it to a limited extent, with quick tips, cheat sheets and links to more guides on other sites.
  • i18n should be implemented from the start, so that we can start maintaining versions of the documentation in non-English languages. GNU Gettext can be used for this
• Modify the build system, to make use of standard GNU utilities: make, autoconf and so on. The current build system is non-standard (but well documented), written mostly in BASH.Read these documents:
  • https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Standard-Targets.html
  • https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Distributions
• Include ChangeLog and NEWS files in the distribution (in the release archives, but probably uncessary in the git repository). ChangeLog entries can be generated automatically, using the gnulib gitlog-to-changelog script, and the NEWS file can be generated from commit messages.
• Generally tweak the site and documentation, to more aggressively promote the freedom aspect (the main goal of the GNU project). We already do this to a great extent (especially on the home page), but there are obviously areas for improvement. A lot of the time, we assume that the reader already knows about the free software philosophy, without actually explaining it to them properly. We need to fix that.
• Document, extensively (and keep it up to date!) full and accurate information about package dependencies, libraries used, etc. We already do this to a great extent (via an installation script for Trisquel and Parabola, and the overall build system in libreboot), but we can do a better job documentation-wise.
• Re-license the documentation under GNU FDL - DONE!
• Make libreboot possible to build from source without network access - DONE! (only in release archives. development in git requires network access, for downloading the extra modules that go into the release archives. There is no way to avoid this, due to what libreboot actually is - a boot firmware distribution, combining several projects, much like you have GNU/Linux distributions which are identical in concept).

Not required, technically, but will make things easier in general, not just for GNU:

• Modify the build system, to directly download (only in git. release archives would have them already) the build dependencies that libreboot currently tells the user to install from their distribution package repository, and build these from source, with our own GCC (re-use coreboot's GCC, which libreboot already uses). This will make complete corresponding source provision easier, because it would be automated; this is in contrast to the present setup, where the person distributing binaries has to include the sources for build dependencies from the distribution that they happened to use for compiling those packages.
  • This will also make everything self-contained, and coreboot already has integration for cross-compiling. We can make cross compilation of utilities for non-x86 architectures much easier, without relying on quirks from the user's GNU/Linux distribution, where the only thing we need from their distribution is the necessary toolchain for building libreboot's own version of GCC, which would then take over
  • However, do not install these dependencies, only self-host them in the libreboot source archive. Also provide an option for the user to ignore libreboot's GCC and dependencies, and use what their GNU/Linux distribution provides, when building from source.