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title: Lists of changes per Retroboot release x-toc-enable: true ...

Updated versions of Retroboot can be found at retroboot.org. Announcements of new Retroboot releases can be found in the news section on the website.

Download the latest Retroboot release here

Retroboot 20210106 beta

Release date: January 6th, 2020.

Retroboot is a coreboot distribution that provides automated building of coreboot ROM images. Retroboot has its own build system named rbmk (short for Retroboot Make) which:

  • Downloads and patches all of the required software components (coreboot, GRUB, SeaBIOS, Tianocore, etc) and patches them as required.
  • Builds required software
  • Builds various coreboot ROM images, using included config files
  • Pre-built ROM images are provided.
  • User support provided
  • Installation instructions provided

In a nutshell, Retroboot aims to make coreboot easy to use, thus making Free Software at a low level more accessible to non-technical people. It provides many advantages such as faster boot speeds and better security (because it's Free Software, the code can be audited). Retroboot provides many unique features that you can't get elsewhere; refer to the documentation.

Changes in this release, versus the 20201228 release:

  • Tianocore payload now provided, on most targets (except ThinkPad X200 and X60). This provides UEFI support, but for now it does not include SeaBIOS CSM so it is a pure UEFI solution (SeaBIOS is provided separately, as a coreboot payload)
  • Vast improvements to the build system; the build system now checks itself, and automatically performs various tasks that used to be done manually.
  • Makefile now included, which simply runs rbmk commands. With this Makefile, Retroboot ROM images can be built more easily (just type make)
  • ThinkPad X200 support added (with up to date coreboot) - one of many Libreboot targets that will soon be assimilated in Retroboot!
  • ThinkPad X60 support added (with up to date coreboot) - yet another Libreboot target assimilated. More to follow in the near future!
  • ThinkPad T420 support added
  • ThinkPad T420S support added
  • Large improvements have been made to the documentation, making them easier to read and understand.
  • Improved grub.cfg included, in ROM images that use the GNU GRUB payload. This improved payload (provided by swiftgeek from the Libreboot project) un-hardcodes a lot of functionality and improves the usability of it, especially on i945 targets such as X60/T60
  • Bug fixed in GNU GRUB build scripts; gnulib submodule in GRUB is now set to an exact revision, by rbmk. Previously, it was uncertain what revision would be used when downloading GRUB.
  • Option ROMs now in a central location (resources/blobs/) rather than copying them to each board directory in resources/coreboot/

This is a beta release, so you should not expect it to be stable or to work on your machine. Extensive testing is required!

NOTE: The build of Tianocore works on X230/X230/T420 but stalls on X200 so it is not supported there for now. Rbmk currently does not support compiling 32 bit Tianocore builds either, only 64-bit, so Tianocore support is excluded on X60/T60 targets.

Retroboot 20201228 beta

Release date: December 28th, 2020.

Retroboot is a new coreboot distribution, forked from the Libreboot 20160907 build system. The purpose of Retroboot is to provide pre-compiled ROM images for any system that coreboot supports. Retroboot, based on coreboot, provides hardware initialization on supported x86 computers; it sets up the hardware and boots an operating system such as GNU+Linux, BSD and Windows.

This release, marked beta, released on 28 December 2020, supports the following machines:

  • ThinkPad X220 (untested at the time of release)
  • ThinkPad X230 (tested on a few machines at the time of release)
  • ThinkPad X230 Tablet (untested at the time of release, but X230 is the same board as the X230T, with minor differences, so the X230T ROMs should work)
  • ThinkPad T60 with ATI Mobility Radeon X1400, PCI ID 1002:7145 (tested on one machine at the time of release)

NOTE: tested in this context means that the machine can be observed booting a Linux kernel. Also, Windows 10 was confirmed to boot on the X230 with Intel VGA ROM and SeaBIOS payload. (we recommend the use of free operating systems like GNU+Linux).

For documentation, refer to the accompnying source code release archive. Documentation is included in that archive. You can also refer to the documentation hosted directly at https://retroboot.org/ and this is more recommended due to it being more up to date.

This is a public beta release. The ROM images provided in this release are NOT guaranteed to boot correctly on your machine. If you install this, you should make sure that you have SPI flashing equipment (for flashing 25XX NOR flash) and, ideally, debugging equipment such as EHCI debug dongle.

Extensive testing is required for all of the ROMs in this release, so user testing is highly encouraged! The plan for Retroboot is to have long, long periods of testing releases, before versions are marked stable (similar to how the Debian project operates).