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Coreboot: Pros and Cons

I’m thinking of getting a new laptop which uses Coreboot. The reason is that I’m into FOSS and would also like to not have IME installed. Currently I’m looking at Starlabs’ Starbook, which can optionally be bought with Coreboot.

Can anyone help me evaluate it? I would likely use Debian 12 as my OS.

Many thanks

readbeanicecream ,

I am using Coreboot on a HP Chromebook that runs Debian 12 + Xfce. So far, I have not run into any issues.

Full disclaimer: My overall needs for this machine are very light/basic.

Jumuta ,

t430 with coreboot works pretty well, though you can’t do some things like flashing the embedded controller and some things like recalibration of the battery doesn’t work

the boot speed is actually insane though, if you have grub as the payload and have it directly boot linux without a bios/uefi

cmhe , (edited )

So generally the pro of coreboot is that it is open source, but the con is that it is open source.

What I mean by that, you can fix any issues yourself, however, if you are unable to do it yourself, you have to wait until someone does it for you and often what features are available and stable are a hit and miss.

Compared to proprietary bioses, the company has some kind of standardized process for developing the bios. So you often get want you would expect. However, if the money flow from the pc vendor to the bios vendor drys up, you, or the community of owners. will not be able to fix any issues.

Linux support should be the same, regardless if you choose proprietary or open source bios. But that depends on how well the coreboot was ported to the platform. So officially supported coreboot bioses are likely better than others.

Personally, if all other attributes are equal, would go with coreboot, because I like to support vendors that offer that choice, and IMO a open source solution, that you can review and build yourself is intrinsically more secure than a binary blob, where you have to blindly trust some corporation. But other security minded people might disagree, which is fine.

propter_hog ,
@propter_hog@hexbear.net avatar

I believe System76 laptops come with Coreboot installed, or at least have it available as an option. Seems nice to have the vendor support versus hoping and praying that your hardware will work with it.

SpeechToTextCloud ,
@SpeechToTextCloud@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

If you’re fine with too, ask mas.to/

Steamymoomilk ,

T440P + libreboot + gentoo, user here Libre boot works great. i had to flash it to my laptop using a raspi. For almost all linux distros it works great. The only i have had problems with booting is haiku and vanilla OS orchid. The screen res borks and super small and duplicated, So i cant install Vanilla OS. and haiku at the moment doesnt support sea bios.

Other than those 2 use cases, its been perfect.

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