retroboot/www/news/retroboot20210205beta.md

% Retroboot 20210205 beta release, 5 February 2021 % Leah Rowe % 5 February 2021

Retroboot provides free (as in freedom) boot firmware for x86 computers, based on coreboot which provides such initialization. It includes software such as GNU GRUB and Tianocore, which can be used as a bootloader alongside coreboot. Retroboot provides a fully automated build system around these various projects with pre-compiled ROM images in every release.

Changes since last release:

• ThinkPad T400 support added from Libreboot (documention not yet added)
• New GNU GRUB version used, with some fixes in it for crypto support
• Death Beeps disabled on all coreboot configs. These are special beeps that happen during failed init, usually during raminit. This silences such errors during failed GM45 (X200/T400) raminit, where coreboot then retries a few more times until raminit succeeds
• Increased the number of GNU GRUB modules, to match the default moddep.lst generated by GNU GRUB when built as a coreboot payload. Notably, ZSTD and LUKS2 support have been added. Module also added allowing Dragonfly BSD installations to boot correctly when using GNU GRUB
• Fix coreboot GM45 bug (X200/T400) where lower memory wasn't being reserved during init. This bug caused the Intel GbE NIC to fail because the linux kernel would try to load the i915 video driver in the same place where the NIC driver is supposed to go
• ROM image archives are now created per board when compiling releases
• Fix bug where Tianocore, if non-existent, is automatically downloaded when building it
• Fix wrong checksum in Intel GbE region on GM45 targets (X200/T400). The checksum is no longer hardcoded, and is now always calculated from scratch by ich9gen

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.