Libreboot – Libreboot 26.10 “Ominous Olive” released! With full UEFI support.

Return to index Article published by: Leah Rowe Date of publication: 15 October 2026 << < Prev Next > >> You can find today’s release in https://rsync.libreboot.org/stable/26.10/ or you can use one of the mirrors. Libreboot is free, open source boot firmware replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware on supported Intel/AMD and ARM64 hardware. It initialises the hardware inside your computer such as the CPU or memory controller, configuring the machine in such a way as to enable use of an operating system like Linux or BSD at boot - and now Microsoft Windows is also compatible because Libreboot has added full UEFI support via MrChromebox EDK2 payload. Libreboot offers greater security and customisation compared to proprietary firmware; its goal, plainly, is to rid the world of proprietary software and to do that, we therefore try to provide firmware that is extremely easy for non-technical users to understand. Today’s release changelog is relative to the previous Libreboot 26.01 release. This is a very special release, with several major design changes made regardless of hardware changes, so users should read this changelog very carefully - and read it twice. First thing’s first. (and yes, you read the previous paragraph correctly) A strongly anti-AI policy was added to a new file: AGENTS.md in lbmk. This is the most important change in the release. Now everything else: WARNING: MAJOR design changes were made to this release, in ways that may affect lots of existing setups. We now use EDK2 as the default payload, with GRUB/SeaBIOS provided in flash as EFI builds for backward compatibility. Everything works, but there are some caveats so please read this release changelog very carefully. The first major change is: The full list of boards is quite long, so it’s shown at the end of this article. All 233 of them! MrChromebox supports nearly every Chromebook, and this release imports all boards from that project. This includes everything up to the most recent Intel and AMD hardware. Imported all 233 currently supported Chromebooks from the MrChromebox coreboot distro. Baytrail (Kip) tested - others need testing. Source-only in this release (must build from source, no binaries provided). This was done with a utility I wrote at util/mrimport/ which generates configs for lbmk, including revisions and submodules. I made further tweaks manually; further updates upstream can be synced in Libreboot by diffing again the output of mrimport between revisions, adapted into Libreboot irrespective of the latter’s modifications which are numerous - and will be covered next. Libreboot makes these modifications to MrChromebox coreboot, in its version: Uses the EDK2 UEFI payload for coreboot, provided by MrChromebox; we set the background colour to Libreboot purple, and use the Libreboot rainbow logo instead of the coreboot logo. Our EDK2 build is otherwise currently identical except for the next changes: Set HAP bit by default, at build time, to disable Intel ME. It is not reliably disabled in MrChromebox coreboot by default as most people using it do so via software-based flashing scripts alongside disablement of Google’s security as shown in MrChromebox documentation. We disable it here. NOTE: We also support numerous AMD Chromebooks, which are unrelated in this context. Unlock IFD regions via ifdtool (with quirks properly handled), setting them read-write at build time. This is done instead of modifying every Intel Flash Descriptor provided by MrChromebox, of which there are hundreds. CSMWrap added inside EDK2 (SeaBIOS CSM wrapped in EFI) for backward compatibility with bare metal SeaBIOS as in older Libreboot releases. GRUB EFI build provided inside EDK2, for backward compatibility also - it behaves, from a user’s perspective, exactly like the coreboot-payload version of GRUB and even reads configs from CBFS in the same way. MemTest86+ added inside EDK2. Haswell chromebooks: native raminit used instead of MRC as in upstream. All Intel chromebooks up to Kabylake: use libgfxinit instead of GOP; upstream has since done this on newer gens as well, and this will be integrated post-release. The additional payloads are, as above, available in the boot menu via ESC keypress at startup. iPXE is also enabled by default, as in upstream, on specific boards. EFI GRUB and CSM SeaBIOS have replaced the coreboot payload versions of these; bare metal SeaBIOS/GRUB are now deprecated and may be removed in a future Libreboot release, although they can be re-enabled by those willing to build Libreboot from source. This is NOT a fork of MrChromebox, which is to be regarded as Libreboot’s upstream on Intel/AMD Chromebooks. Efforts will be made, as with regular coreboot, to remain as closely in sync with it as possible at all times. I have worked extensively with MrChromebox, and even submitted a few minor fixes to his project; he also implemented CBFS-based VBT and GOP handling per my request, which I will integrate post-release. Regardless, MrChromebox’s own installation scripts should work, with Libreboot images, so check out MrChromebox documentation for installation. Despite changes, Libreboot’s setup remains behaviourally compatible with the MrChromebox one and, thus, MrChromebox tooling should still work alongside corresponding documentation. This is made possible by a new feature in Libreboot’s build system: support for an arbitrary number of upstreams per project. We still provide regular coreboot on non-Chromebook mainboards. Yes, 233. I counted. All automated. My scripting and my fastidiousness ensured that what I imported and configured in lbmk closely matched upstream, and I’m quite careful at maintaining my own divergence from it inside Libreboot. Yes, Libreboot runs on Chromebooks now! E.g. KGPE-D16. We use the coreboot fork from 15h.org now, on AMD Fam15h mainboards. This uses AMD AGESA source code instead of Timothy’s custom init code. It has much more reliable raminit and CPU initialisation; more RAM also supported. Many bugs are fixed. IOMMU works, I also saw that they mentioned TPM is fixed in their version, now our version also. Regular binaries with SeaBIOS and GRUB payloads provided - we also have experimental EDK2-based images, currently source-only (no binaries available). EDK2 requires a framebuffer to be set up, and the integrated AST2050 chip only starts in text mode on native initialisation; the vendor VGA ROM can set up VESA, but we will not use the VGA ROM. The EDK2-based images are source-only on these boards, intended for use with graphics cards. Basically, these boards actually work for the first time. EDK2 is Intel’s reference implementation of the UEFI specification, for booting. It’s typically used by vendors, in proprietary forks of Intel’s BSD-licensed code, but Intel’s reference code is Free Software. We use their reference code, and full source code is provided in this Libreboot release. EDK is short for: EFI Development Kit. More specifically: We use a fork of EDK2 provided by MrChromebox, which specifically offers use of EDK2 as a generic coreboot payload. This is a complete, industry-standard UEFI implementation capable of booting any compliant operating system. All. Nearly all boards use it in Libreboot now, even older ones e.g. ThinkPad X200. Tested on all platforms. Older, 32-bit-only mainboards still use the setup from the previous release, while virtually all 64-bit-compatible hardware now use EDK2. EFI builds of GRUB and SeaBIOS are provided in flash, accessible from the EDK2 setup menu (press ESC at boot time when prompted), for backward compatibility with existing Linux/BSD installations in Libreboot. EDK2 support was integrated as a prerequisite for Chromebooks, but then it was extended for use on all previously existing supported mainboards in Libreboot. It even runs well on really old machines e.g. ThinkPad T500. All Libreboot boards now use an open source UEFI implementation by default, where feasible. All of them, and it’s by default - the bare metal GRUB and SeaBIOS coreboot payloads have been removed, replaced by EFI versions that are backward compatible. We previously did not provide UEFI at all, except for U-Boot on a few select mainboards. We now provide full UEFI, with all four freedoms intact, on nearly every mainboard that Libreboot supports. All of the following operating systems were tested and confirmed working, on various Libreboot machines using EDK2: Windows 10 and 11 9front (fork of Plan 9) various other UEFI-compliant operating systems Linux UKI bootloaders, systemd-boot, etc. UKIs work perfectly now, booting from EDK2. Modern Linux distro setups now work (GRUB not required). OpenBSD with EFI bootloader and GPT partitioning (older SeaBIOS txtmode can only do MBR partitioning in Libreboot) FreeBSD in UEFI mode - txtmode no longer required! ReactOS did not work, unfortunately (no UEFI support) RedoxOS probably works too. Modern computers and operating systems are all UEFI, and this new setup can boot basically all of it reliably. More testing will be required, but this is battle-tested code and it has been used extensively in coreboot by many users, for many years. Libreboot finally has it as well. This change alone is part of a much wider effort to modernise Libreboot, and I’m only getting started. The next Libreboot releases will draw heavily on this, as EDK2 is pretty much the expected payload on a lot of modern coreboot setups these days. Integration of EDK2 removes all limitations in Libreboot, allowing us to support much newer hardware and it basically makes Libreboot much easier to use; I expect Libreboot to become much more popular and useful over time, as a result. Some caveats and extra notes are provided at the end of this release page, for migration purposes. For example, despite boasting about all, older 32-bit-only hardware still use bare GRUB/SeaBIOS. Nearly all boards use EDK2 however! Finally, some notes about graphics cards that may be of interest to the more