18 February 2025
Article published by: Leah Rowe in Canoe Leah Mode™
Date of publication: 18 February 2025
Canoeboot is a special fork of Libreboot, providing a de-blobbed configuration on fewer motherboards; Libreboot supports more hardware, and much newer hardware. More information can be found on Canoeboot’s about page and by reading Libreboot’s Binary Blob Reduction Policy.
This is a revision release, amending the original 20250107 release.
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. Linux). It is specifically a coreboot distribution, like how Debian is a Linux distribution. It provides an automated build system to produce coreboot ROM images with a variety of payloads such as 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 GRUB to boot your operating system; on ARM(chromebooks), we provide U-Boot (as a coreboot payload). Experimental x86 U-Boot support is also available.
There aren’t that many changes cbmk-wise, but these GRUB security fixes were merged:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2025-02/msg00024.html
These are critical fixes, so a new revision release and announcement is being made. Users are strongly advised to upgrade, if they were using the GRUB payload.
Several other fixes have been made, such as improved LVM scanning in the GRUB configuration. Improvements to nvmutil from master have also been made, such as adding support for 16KB and 128KB GbE files.
Markdown file for this page: https://canoeboot.org/news/canoeboot20250107rev1.md
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