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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

This is just the BIOS, not the CPU nor the rest of the hardware.

For a GPL BIOS, Coreboot/Libreboot has already existed for a while.

Eh kind of? Coreboot effectively provides the hardware initialisation layer - if you want runtime firmware you're going to need a payload like SeaBIOS (which is GPLed, but which isn't really intended to bring up real hardware from scratch)

I won't say what it was intended for per se, but IIRC coreboot+seabios boots a lot of chromebooks just fine.

Yes, Coreboot does the hardware bringup and then hands off to SeaBIOS. SeaBIOS can't do that on its own.

For a GPL BIOS, Coreboot/Libreboot has already existed for a while.

For, what, a handful of old laptops? It's not a general solution for libre booting.

Every single modern x86 chromebook has coreboot support.

That said: most if not all of them require some proprietary bits to initialize ram timings and to run the security coprocessors (Amd PSP, Intel ME).

Older intel based systems (like the Lenovo x200) have coreboot support that can work without the ME firmware (but still requiring the EC firmware).

A list of many of the google devices with coreboot support (note: they're all codenames, not marketing names): https://doc.coreboot.org/security/vboot/list_vboot.html#goog...

So that means, what, 0.1% of machines, not 0.001% of machines have coreboot support? Well that makes all the difference in the world...

I don't know what the percent of existing machines are chromebooks.

But that wasn't the question posed, it was:

> For, what, a handful of old laptops?

And the answer there is "no".

The point (that is, the thing that matters, which admittedly you would have to actually read the thread for understanding) is that libreboot isn't available on enough platforms to be a free alternative to proprietary boot methods for most people. And that's even including all the chromebooks in the world. But Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, so I guess you can claim to have fixed that.

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