The latest version of Coreboot, a project aimed at developing a free alternative to proprietary firmware and BIOS, has been released. Coreboot 4.21, distributed under the GPLV2 license, was the result of the collaboration of over 140 developers who made 1,200 changes.
Some of the key changes in Coreboot 4.21 include:
- Added support for 31 motherboards, with 11 boards specifically used on devices with Chrome OS or Google servers, and 10 boards used on System76 devices. The other boards not related to Google and System76 include: Bytedance, HP Compaq Elite 8300 USDT, HP Elitebook 820 G2, IBM sbp1, Intel raptorlake based on Alderlake-P RVP, Inventec Transformers, MSI Pro Z790-P (WiFi) and MSI Pro Z790-P (WiFi) DDR4, and Star Labs Starbook Mk VI (i3-1315U and i7-1360p).
- Continued support for the Intel Galileo motherboard.
- Added the capability to localize the text displayed to the user.
- Improved support for the boot screensaver and made changes to the code for displaying JPEG images.
- Completely rewritten the UHCI USB-Hub driver using code from the XHCI driver.
- Refined the code for implementing the framework.
- Ensured PCIE 5.0 HSPHY firmware in the SPI Flash, enabling the use of PCIe 5.0 basic ports regardless of accessibility to CSME (Converged Security and Management Engine) and Heci (Host Embeded Controller Interface).
- Added support for extracting and displaying logs of TPM (Trusted Platform Module) to the CBMEM utility.
- Expanded the Inteltool utility to include Intel 700 series chipsets and Intel 800.
- Updated the payload components to U-boot 2023.07, EDK2-MRCHROMEBOX 202306, Tint 0.07, and SeaBIOS 1.16.2.
- Updated tools like LLVM 16.0.6, NASM 2.16.01, CMAKE 3.26.4, and GCC 11.4.0.
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