Canoeboot 20241207 released! 100% Free BIOS, GNU FSDG compliant. Now with U-Boot UEFI payload available on x86 machines

Yes that's right. You can use UEFI on a ThinkPad X200 now. The original vendor firmware (Lenovo) couldn't do UEFI! This feature has also been made available on many more mainboards, including the T400, T500, Dell Latitude E6400 and so on.

To be clear: this is not EDK2/Tianocore. It's U-Boot. U-Boot runs as a coreboot payload and provides a UEFI boot environment, which makes installing GNU+Linux and BSD systems much easier than on, say, the GRUB or SeaBIOS payloads.

Hi,

https://canoeboot.org/news/canoeboot20241207.html

Canoeboot is a free/libre BIOS/UEFI replacement on x86 and ARM, providing boot firmware that initialises the hardware in your computer, to then load an operating system (e.g. GNU+Linux). It is specifically a coreboot distribution, like how Trisquel is a GNU+Linux distribution. It provides an automated build system to produce coreboot ROM images with a variety of payloads such as GNU GRUB or SeaBIOS, with regular well-tested releases to make coreboot as easy to use as possible for non-technical users. From a project management perspective, this works in exactly the same way as a Linux distro, providing a source-based package manager (called cbmk) which patches sources and compiles coreboot images. It makes use of coreboot for hardware initialisation, and then a payload such as SeaBIOS or GNU GRUB to boot your operating system; on ARM(chromebooks), we provide U-Boot (as a coreboot payload).

For Canoeboot 20241207, today’s release, U-Boot is also provided as an optional coreboot payload on x86 machines. This provides a sensible UEFI implementation, useful for booting GNU+Linux and BSD systems more easily. More information available on the U-Boot x86 page.

Information about the U-Boot payload can be found here:

https://canoeboot.org/docs/uboot/uboot-x86.html

Highlights for this release:

* U-Boot payload now available on x86 machines (previously only available for ARM64). With this, you can boot any number of GNU/Linux systems via UEFI. U-Boot provides a sensible, lightweight UEFI implementation. It's not quite as complete as EDK2, but boots every distro I've tried so far reliably.

* U-Boot also updated to the latest v2024.10 release, on both x86 and ARM devices

* Various bug fixes in the build system.

The U-Boot tree in Canoeboot contains several fixes not currently present in mainline U-Boot:

* Auto-boot timeout on the bootflow menu. This will auto-boot the first selected menu item after a few seconds, unless interrupted; you can interrupt it by navigating the menu to choose something else. The timer is stopped when interrupted. I implemented this myself, for the release. U-Boot also currently does not support setting a custom background colour on the bootflow menu, so this was hacked into the release by hardcoding the colour that U-Boot sets when drawing and re-drawing the bootflow menu.

* A patch from Simon Glass that silently disables U-Boot's serial console if a suitable serial device is not found. Not all machines have serial output on them, and U-Boot would otherwise hang at boot time; this patch prevents U-Boot from hanging. Simon Glass is the principle maintainer of U-Boot's coreboot payload.

This is based on the recent stable release of Libreboot, namely Libreboot 20241206. Therefore, this can be considered a stable release of Canoeboot.