Coreboot was formerly called LinuxBIOS and is a project that replaces the mostly proprietary BIOS of a computer with a free implementation. Originally LinuxBIOS actually booted a complete kernel, but from Linux 2.6 did not fit into most flash ROMs on standard motherboards. The project was then renamed Coreboot in 2008 and has since been a minimal code that reloads other code such as GRUB2.
After Coreboot 4.9 in December 2018 now appeared the new version 4.10, which, as can be read in the Coreboot blog, provides advanced hardware support for notebooks, motherboards, and chips. The new version includes 2538 changes from 198 authors. Among them were 85 authors who made their first contribution to Coreboot. The code grew by about 11,000 lines, plus about 5,000 lines of comments added.
A total of 28 new motherboards are supported, 7 no longer relevant boards were removed. In addition to various Chromebooks, motherboards from Asrock, Asus, Foxconn, and Gigabyte are also being supported. Also compatible for the first time is Coreboot 4.10 with Lenovo’s Thinkpads R500 and X1 Carbon and Purisms Librem 13v4 and Librem 15v4.
For the newly supported chips, the announcement lists the “AMD Picasso” APU and the Qualcomm QCS405 SoC, with three older CPUs removed. The coreboot toolchain has been updated to GCC 8.3.0, Binutils 2.32, IASL 20190509, and Clang 8. As part of GSoC 2019, the code was cleaned up after an analysis by Coverty Scan identified a need for action. The results have to a large extent already flowed into 4.10. The next version of Coreboot 4.11 is scheduled for October.
Source: https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/27280/coreboot-410-unterst%C3%83%C2%BCtzt-mehr-notebooks-chromebooks-mainboards-und-chips.html
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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