index.md 3.7 KB
title: Documentation ...
Always check libreboot.org for the latest updates to Libreboot. General news can be found in the main news section. News specifically about Libreboot releases can be found in the release logs.
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Libreboot.
Installing libreboot
Installing operating systems
Information for developers
- How to compile the libreboot source code
- Depthcharge payload (OBSOLETE in current Libreboot releases)
- GRUB payload
Other information
How do I know what version I'm running? {#version}
If you are at least 127 commits after release 20150518 (commit message build/roms/helper: add version information to CBFS) (or you have any upstream stable release of libreboot after 20150518), then you can press C at the GRUB console, and use this command to find out what version of libreboot you have:
cat (cbfsdisk)/lbversion
Alternatively, you may run this command in GRUB:
lscoreboot
If you're using SeaBIOS, information is provided there aswell.
This will also work on non-release images (the version string is
automatically generated, using git describe --tags HEAD), built from
the git repository. A file named version will also be included in the
archives that you downloaded (if you are using release archives).
If it exists, you can also extract this lbversion file by using the
cbfstool utility which libreboot includes, from a ROM image that you
either dumped or haven't flashed yet. In your distribution, run
cbfstool on your ROM image (libreboot.rom, in this example):
./cbfstool libreboot.rom extract -n lbversion -f lbversion
You will now have a file, named lbversion, which you can read in
whatever program it is that you use for reading/writing text files.
For git, it's easy. Just check the git log.
For releases on or below 20150518, or snapshots generated from the git repository below 127 commits after 20150518, you can find a file named commitid inside the archives. If you are using pre-built ROM images from the libreboot project, you can press C in GRUB for access to the terminal, and then run this command:
lscoreboot
You may find a date in here, detailing when that ROM image was built. For pre-built images distributed by the libreboot project, this is a rough approximation of what version you have, because the version numbers are dated, and the release archives are typically built on the same day as the release; you can correlate that with the release information in release.md.
For 20160818, note that the lbversion file was missing from CBFS on GRUB images. You can still find out what libreboot version you have by comparing checksums of image dumps (with the descriptor blanked out with 00s, and the same done to the ROMs from the release archive, if you are on a GM45 laptop).
There may also be a ChangeLog file included in your release archive, so that you can look in there to figure out what version you have.
You can also check the documentation that came with your archives, and in docs/release.html will be the information about the version of libreboot that you are using.
Generally speaking, it is advisable to use the latest version of libreboot.