Canoeboot 20250107 released! 100% Free BIOS, GNU FSDG compliant. Now with Raspberry Pi Pico 2 / RP2530 serprog support.

Hello everyone,

I'm pleased to announce a new Canoeboot release:

https://canoeboot.org/news/canoeboot20250107.html

Highlights:

* ./mk inject function added, based on the Libreboot one, but the Canoeboot one only sets MAC addresses; it does not download/inject vendor files. It uses the same setmac command syntax. It’s documented now on the nvmutil page.

* coreboot/next, GRUB and SeaBIOS revisions updated to the latest ones from 5 January 2025

* RP2530 devices now supported in pico-serprog, e.g. Raspberry Pi Pico 2. These are cheap MCU boards, reprogrammable. We already support RP2040 for a long time now. Now we have RP2040 (e.g. Pi Pico) and RP2530 (e.g. Pico 2). Our serprog firmware flashed on one of these provides a cheap, reliable SPI flasher, fully free firmware too, including the boot rom.

* Bumped flashprog to revision eb2c041 (14 Nov 2024). This brings in several important fixes from upstream. This is what we use now, instead of flashrom, for over a year.

* Various build system fixes; fully build-tested on Debian Sid and ArchLinux, so should work nicely in say, Parabola GNU/Linux-libre. These fixes address minor issues found in the December 2024 release.

* General improvements to the build system; fixing globbing issues, stricter error handling, safer exits under certain edge cases (e.g. handing of temporary files).

Essentially, this is a bugfix release, relative to the Canoeboot 20241207 release. Canoeboot 20250107 is based on and in sync with the Libreboot changes, up to the recent Libreboot 20241206 revision 8 released which was released on 6 January 2025.

Supported hardware:

Games consoles

* Sony Playstation (PS1/PSX)

Servers (AMD, x86)

* ASUS KFSN4-DRE motherboard
* ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard

Desktops (AMD, Intel, x86)

* Acer G43T-AM3
* Apple iMac 5,2
* ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard
* Dell OptiPlex 780 variants e.g. MT, USFF
* Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L motherboard
* Intel D510MO and D410PT motherboards
* Intel D945GCLF

Laptops (Intel, x86)

* Apple MacBook1,1 and MacBook2,1
* Dell Latitude E4300, E6400, E6400 XFR and E6400 ATG
* Lenovo ThinkPad R400
* Lenovo ThinkPad R500
* Lenovo ThinkPad T400 / T400S
* Lenovo ThinkPad T500 / W500
* Lenovo ThinkPad T60, X60, X60S, X60 Tablet (with Intel GPU)
* Lenovo ThinkPad X200 / X200S / X200 Tablet

Laptops (ARM, with U-Boot payload)

* ASUS Chromebook Flip C101 (gru-bob)
* Samsung Chromebook Plus (v1) (gru-kevin)

Emulation

* Qemu x86 and arm64