Canoeboot 20231026 released!

Leah Rowe in Canoe Leah Mode™

26 October 2023

Article published by: Leah Rowe in Canoe Leah Mode™

Date of publication: 26 October 2023

Introduction

This new release, Canoeboot 20231026, released today 26 October 2023, is based on the Libreboot 20231021 release, porting changes in it on top of nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 as a base. The previous release was nonGeNUine Boot 20230717, released on 17 July 2023; the project named nonGeNUine Boot has been renamed to Canoeboot, in this release, which is the first ever release under the name Canoeboot.

Canoeboot provides boot firmware for supported x86/ARM machines, starting a bootloader that then loads your operating system. It replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware on x86 machines, and provides an improved configuration on ARM-based chromebooks supported (U-Boot bootloader, instead of Google’s depthcharge bootloader). On x86 machines, the GRUB and SeaBIOS coreboot payloads are officially supported, provided in varying configurations per machine. It provides an automated build system for the configuration and installation of coreboot ROM images, making coreboot easier to use for non-technical people. You can find the list of supported hardware in Canoeboot documentation.

Canoeboot’s main benefit is higher boot speed, better security and more customisation options compared to most proprietary firmware. As a libre software project, the code can be audited, and coreboot does regularly audit code. The other main benefit is freedom to study, adapt and share the code, a freedom denied by most boot firmware, but not Canoeboot! Booting Linux/BSD is also well supported.

Canoeboot is maintained in parallel with Libreboot, and by the same developer, Leah Rowe, who maintains both projects; Canoeboot implements the GNU Free System Distribution Guideline as policy, whereas Libreboot implements its own Binary Blob Reduction Policy.

Work done since last release

No new mainboards have been added in Canoeboot 20231026, versus nonGeNUine Boot 20230717, but a slew of build system enhancements and new features have been ported from Libreboot.

However, the following mainboards added in Libreboot 20231021 have been excluded in this Canoeboot release, due to the GNU FSDG policy: HP EliteBook 2170p, HP EliteBook 8470p, Dell Precision T1650 and Dell Latitude E6430.

GRUB LUKS2 now supported (with argon2 key derivation)

This new Canoeboot release imports the PHC argon2 implementation into GRUB, courtesy of Axel who initially ported the code to run under GRUB 2.06, but this Canoeboot release uses GRUB 2.12 (an RC revision from git, at present).

Axel’s code was published to this AUR repository which Nicholas Johnson then rebased on top of GRUB 2.12, and I then imported the work into Libreboot, with Johnson’s blessing; Canoeboot has inherited this work in full.

These libreboot patches added argon2 support, and have been ported to Canoeboot in this 20231026 release:

This means that you can now boot from encrypted /boot partitions. I’m very grateful to everyone who made this possible!

Simplified commands (build system)

Simply put, cbmk (the Canoeboot build system) is now easier to use than gbmk (the nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 build system) was; there are only 9 shell scripts in this release, versus 50 or so in the nonGeNU 20230717 release, and the command structure has been simplified.

You can find information about using the build system in the Canoeboot build instructions and in the cbmk maintenance manual.

The Libreboot 20231021 release has 12 scripts, bacause there are 3 more scripts there for handling the downloading of vendor code; since Canoeboot intentionally avoids doing that, those scripts are not needed in Canoeboot and have therefore been excluded. They are: script/vendor/download, script/vendor/inject and include/mrc.sh.

TWO massive audits. 50% code size reduction in lbmk.

Libreboot’s build system, lbmk, is written entirely in shell scripts. It is an automatic build system that downloads, patches, configures and compiles source trees such as coreboot and various payloads, to build complete ROM images that are easier to install. More info about that is available in the lbmk maintenance manual - and you can read the cbmk maintenance manual for comparison.

The primary focus of Libreboot 20231021 cultiminated in two audits, namely Libreboot Build System Audit 2 and then Libreboot Build System Audit 3.

The changes in those audits have been ported to this Canoeboot release.

Changes include things like vastly reduced code complexity (while not sacrificing functionality), greater speed (at compiling, and boot speeds are higher when you use the GRUB payload), many bug fixes and more.

Serprog firmware building (RP2040 and STM32)

In addition to coreboot firmware, the Canoeboot build system (lbmk) can now build serprog firmware, specifically pico-serprog and stm32-vserprog, on all devices that these projects support.

The serprog protocol is supported by flashrom, to provide SPI flashing. It can be used to set up an external SPI flasher, for flashing Canoeboot externally. This too has been ported from Libreboot.

Pre-compiled firmware images are available, for many of these devices, under the roms/ directory in this Canoeboot 20231026 release! Riku Viitanen is the one who added this capability to Libreboot, which was then ported to Canoeboot.

Updated U-Boot revision (2023.10)

Alper Nebi Yasak submitted patches that update the U-Boot revision in Libreboot, on gru_bob and gru_kevin chromebooks. Additionally, the cros coreboot tree has merged there with the default tree instead (and the default tree has been updated to coreboot from 12 October 2023).

Many improvements were made to these boards, which you can learn about by reading these diffs:

All of these patches have been ported to this Canoeboot release.

Coreboot, GRUB, U-Boot and SeaBIOS revisions

In Canoeboot 20231026 (this release):

Coreboot (default): commit ID d862695f5f432b5c78dada5f16c293a4c3f9fce6, 12 October 2023
Coreboot (cros): MERGED WITH coreboot/default (see above)
Coreboot (fam15h_udimm): commit ID 1c13f8d85c7306213cd525308ee8973e5663a3f8, 16 June 2021
GRUB: commit ID e58b870ff926415e23fc386af41ff81b2f588763, 3 October 2023
SeaBIOS: commit ID 1e1da7a963007d03a4e0e9a9e0ff17990bb1608d, 24 August 2023
U-Boot: commit ID 4459ed60cb1e0562bc5b40405e2b4b9bbf766d57, 2 October 2023

In nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 (previous release):

Coreboot (default): commit ID e70bc423f9a2e1d13827f2703efe1f9c72549f20, 17 February 2023
Coreboot (cros): commit ID 8da4bfe5b573f395057fbfb5a9d99b376e25c2a4 2 June 2022
Coreboot (fam15h_udimm): DID NOT EXIST
GRUB: commit ID f7564844f82b57078d601befadc438b5bc1fa01b, 14 February 2023
SeaBIOS: commit ID ea1b7a0733906b8425d948ae94fba63c32b1d425, 20 January 2023
U-Boot (for coreboot/cros): commit ID 890233ca5569e5787d8407596a12b9fca80952bf, 9 January 2023

As you can see, all revisions are quite new in this release.

Build system tweaks

resources/ now config/

The resources/scripts/ directory is now script/, and what was resources/ now only contains configuration data plus code patches for various projects, so it has been renamed to config/ - I considered splitting patches into patch/, but the current directory structure for patches is not a problem so I left it alone.

Also, the IFD/GbE files have been moved here, under config/ifd/. These can always be ge-generated if the user wants to, using ich9gen, or using a combination of bincfg and ifdtool from coreboot, and nvmutil (to change the mac address) from Canoeboot or Libreboot.

Full list of changes (detail)

These changes have been ported from the Libreboot 20231021 release, which are mostly the results of the two audits (mentioned above):

Much stricter, more robust error handling; too many changes to list here, so check the git log. Also, errors that are not errors are no longer treated as such; nonGeNUine Boot 20230717’s build system was actually too strict, sometimes.
Most logic has been unified in single scripts that perform once type of task each, instead of multiple scripts performing the same type of talk; for example, defconfig-based projects now handled with the same scripts, and preparing trees for them is done the same. These unifications have been done carefully and incrementally, with great thought so as to prevent spaghetti. The code is clean, and small.
GitHub is no longer used on main Git repository links, instead only as backup
Backup repositories now defined, for all main repos under config/git/
Single-tree projects are no longer needlessly re-downloaded when they already have been downloaded.
GRUB LUKS2 support now available, with argon2 key derivation; previously, only PBKDF2 worked so most LUKS2 setups were unbootable in Canoeboot. This is fixed.
Vastly reduced number of modules in GRUB, keeping only what is required.
Use --mtime and option options in GNU Tar (if it is actually GNU Tar), when creating Tar archives. This results in partially reproducible source archives, and consistent hashes were seen in testing, but not between distros.
Always re-inialitise .git within lbmk, for the build system itself, if Git history was removed as in releases. This work around some build systems like coreboot that use Git extensively, and are error-prone without it.
More robust makefile handling in source trees; if one doesn’t exist, error out but also check other makefile name combinations, and only error out if the command was to actually build.
ROMs build script: support the “all” argument, even when getopt options are used e.g. -k
Disabled the pager in grub.cfg, because it causes trouble in some non-interactive setups where the user sees an errant message on the screen and has to press enter. This fixes boot interruptions in some cases, allowing normal use of the machine. The pager was initially enabled many years ago, to make use of cat a bit easier in the GRUB shell, but the user can just enable the pager themselves if they really want to.
U-Boot can now be compiled standalone, without using the ROMs build script, because crossgcc handling is provided for U-Boot now in addition to coreboot.
All helper scripts are now under include/, and main scripts in script/, called by the main build script
Generally purge unused variables in shell scripts
Simplified initialisation of variables in shell scripts, using the setvars function defined under include/err.sh
Support patch subdirectories, when applying patches. This is done recursively, making it possible to split up patch files into smaller sets inside sub directories, per each source tree (or target of each source tree, where a project is multi-tree within lbmk)
SPDX license headers now used, almost universally, in all parts of cbmk.
Files such as those under config/git are now concatenated, traversing recursively through the target directory; files first, then directories in order, and for each directory, follow the same pattern until all files are concatenated. This same logic is also used for patches. This now enables use of subdirectories, in some config/patch directories.
General code cleanup on util/nvmutil
Git histories are more thoroughly deleted, in third party source trees during release time.
Symlinks in release archives are no longer hard copies; the symlinks are re-created by the release script, because it clones the current lbmk work directory via Git (local git clone), rather than just using cp to copy links.
Properly output to stderr, on printf commands in scripts where it is either a warning prior to calling err, or just something that belongs on the error output (instead of standard output).
Don’t use the -B option in make commands.
SECURITY: Use sha512sum (not sha1sum) when verifying certain downloads. This reduces the chance for collisions, during checksum verification.
Set GRUB timout to 5s by default, but allow override and set to 10s or 15s on some mainboards.
Support both curl and wget, where files are downloaded outside of Git; defer to Wget when Curl fails, and try each program three times before failing. This results in more resilient downloading, on wobbly internet connections.
Don’t clone Git repositories into /tmp, because it might be a tmpfs with little memory available; clone into tmp/gitclone instead, within lbmk, and mv it to avoid unnecessary additional writes (mv is much more efficient than cp, for this purpose).
Removed unused target.cfg handling in vendor scripts, because they use the concatenated config format instead (they always have).
Coreboot builds: automatically run make-oldconfig, to mitigate use of raw coreboot config where a revision was updated but the config was untouched. This may still result in a confirmation dialog, and it’s still recommended that the configs be updated per revision (or switch them to defconfigs).
Vastly simplified directory structure; resources/scripts/ is now script/, and resources/ was renamed to config/; ifd and gbe files were also moved to config/ifd/. Commands are now 1-argument instead of 2, for example the ./build boot roms command is now ./build roms.
memtest86plus: only build it on 64-bit hosts, for now (32-bit building is broken on a lot of distros nowadays, and lbmk doesn’t properly handle cross compilation except on coreboot or U-Boot)
(courtesy of Riku Viitanen) don’t use cat on loops that handle lines of text. Instead, use the read command that is built into sh, reading each line. This is more efficient, and provides more robust handling on lines with spaces in them.
ALL projects now have submodules downloaded at build time, not just multi tree projects such as coreboot - and a few projects under config/git have had certain depend items removed, if a given project already defines it under .gitmodules (within its repository).
Improved cbutils handling; it’s now even less likely to needlessly re-build if it was already built.
The release build script no longer archives what was already built, but instead builds from scratch, creating an archive from source downloads first before building the ROM archives. This saves time because it enables a single build test per release, whereas at was previously necessary to test the Git repository and then the release archive. Testing both is still desired, but this behaviour also means that whatever is built at release time is guaranteed to be the same as what the user would build (from archives).
Improved handling of target.cfg files in multi-tree projects coreboot, SeaBIOS and U-Boot. Unified to all such projects, under one script, and with improved error handling.
GRUB payload: all ROM images now contain the same ELF, with all keymaps inserted. This speeds up the build process, and enables easier configuration when changing the keyboard layout because less re-flashing is needed.
Simplified IFD handling on ICH9M platforms (e.g. X200/T400 thinkpads); the ich9gen utility wasn’t needed anymore so ich9utils has been removed, and now the IFD/GbE files are included pre-assembled (generated by ich9gen). Ich9gen can still be used, or you can re-generate with coreboot’s bincfg; the ifdtool util can be used to edit IFD and nvmutil (part of Canoeboot) can change MAC addresses. The ich9utils code was always redundant for the last few years, especially since 2022 when nvmutil was first written.
Running as root is now forbidden, for most commands; lbmk will exit with non-zero status if you try. The ./build dependencies x commands still work as root (they’re the only commands available as root).
Enabled memtest86plus on more boards, where it wasn’t previously enabled.
Only enable SeaBIOS as first payload on desktops, but still enable GRUB as second payload where GRUB is known to work (on each given host). The text mode and coreboot framebuffer modes are provided in each case, where feasible.
The list command has been mostly unified, making it easier to tell (from lbmk) what commands are available, without having to manually poke around under script/.
The -T0 flag is now used, universally, on xz commands. This makes xz run on multiple threads, greatly speeding up the creation of large tar archives.
Universally use -j in make commands, for multi-threading, but it relies on nproc to get thread count, so this only works if you have nproc (you probably don’t, if you run BSD; BSD porting is still on TODO for Canoeboot)
File names as arguments now universally have quotes wrapped around them, and similar auditing has been done to all variables used as arguments everywhere in lbmk. There were cases where multiple arguments were wrongly quoted then treated as a single argument, and vice versa. This is now fixed.
Re-wrote .gitcheck; now, a global git name/email config is always required. The only behaviour (setting local config, and unsetting) was quite error-prone under fault conditions, where cleanup may not have been provided, or when execution was interrupted, resulting sometimes in accidentally committing to lbmk.git as author named lbmkplaceholder.
The new BSD-like coding style is now used on all shell scripts in lbmk. A few scripts still used the old lbmk coding style, as of audit 2.
Scripts no longer directly exit with non-zero status, under fault conditions; instead, x_ or err is used to provide such behaviour. This results in all exits from lbmk being consolidated to err, under fault conditions. - zero exits are also consolidated, going only through the main script, which has its own exit function called lbmk_exit that provides TMPDIR cleanup.
BSD-style error handling implemented, with an err function (and functions that use it) inside include/err.sh; there is also x_ which can be used to run a command and exit automatically with non-zero status, useful because it provides more verbose output than if you just relied on set -e, and it still works when a script does not use set -e - however, it is not used on all functions, because it works by executing $@ directly, which can break depending on arguments. Therefore, some scripts just default to || err for providing breakage in scripts.
Memtest 6.2 now used (instead of 5.x releases). This is essentially a re-write, and it works on the coreboot framebuffer, whereas previous revisions only worked on text mode setups.
NO MAKEFILE. The Makefile in lbmk has been removed. It was never meaningfully used because all it did was run lbmk commands, without implementing any logic itself. A Makefile may be added again in the future, but with a view to installing just the build system onto the host system, to then build ROM images under any number of directories. Lbmk’s design is strictly no-Makefile, but it uses Makefiles provided by third party source trees when building them.
Safer GRUB configuration file handling between GRUB memdisk and coreboot CBFS; it is no longer possible to boot without a GRUB config, because the one in GRUB memdisk is provided as a failsafe, overridden by inserting one in CBFS, but there is no config in CBFS by default anymore.
The build system warns users about elf/ vs bin/, when it comes to flashing coreboot ROM images; it tells them to use bin/ because those images do contain payloads, whereas the ones under elf/ do not.
VASTLY more efficient build process; all coreboot ROMs without payload are now cached under elf/, as are payloads, then they are joined separately by the usual ROMs build script, and these cached ROMs contain many changes in them that were previously handled by moverom in the main ROM build script. Under the new design, repetitive steps are avoided; payloads are inserted into a copy of the cached ROMs under TMPDIR, before being copied for keymaps and small files; this eliminates delays caused by slow compression (LZMA is always used, when inserting payloads). After crossgcc and the payloads are compiled, the ROM with coreboot builds in under a minute, whereas it would have previously taken several minutes on most Canoeboot-supported hardware.
VASTLY reduced GRUB payload size; modules that aren’t needed have been removed resulting in much smaller GRUB payloads, that also boot faster.
ALL defconfig creation, updating and modification are handled by the same script that also handles compiling, as mentioned in the bullet-point below.
ALL main source trees are now compiled, downloaded, configured and cleaned using the same script. The download (Git) logic is a separate file under include/ and its functions are called by the main build script, which provides a stub for this.
Scripts are no longer executed directly, ever, except the main script. All scripts are otherwise executed from script/, inheriting the TMPDIR variable set (and exported) by lbmk.
Generally improved user feedback in scripts, especially the vendor scripts.
Coreboot, U-Boot and SeaBIOS are now downloaded, configured and compiled using the exact same script. Although these codebases differ wildly, their build systems use the same design, and they are compatible from a user-interface perspective.
Vastly improved /tmp handling; a universal TMPDIR is set (environmental variable) and exported to all child processes running lbmk scripts. On exit, the main tmp directory is purged, cleaning all tmp directories under it.
General simplification of coding style on all shell scripts.
Fixed some variable initialisations in the coreboot ROM image build script
Don’t enable u-boot on QEMU x86 images (due to buggy builds, untested)
Fixed coreboot-version file inserted into coreboot trees, when compiled on Canoeboot release archives.
Very general auditing has been done, finding and fixing bugs.
Reduced the number of scripts significantly. There were about 50 scripts in the nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 build system. There are closer to 20 in today’s Canoeboot 20231026 revision.
Many scripts that were separate are now unified. For example: the scripts handling defconfigs files on SeaBIOS, u-Boot and coreboot have now been merged into a single script, performing the same work better in less code.
Ditto many other scripts; repeated logic unified, logic generalised. The logic for downloading coreboot and u-boot was unified into one script, basing off of the coreboot one, and then expanding to also cover SeaBIOS. Most building (e.g. handling of Makefiles) is now done in a single script.
Far superior error handling; in many scripts, the -e option in sh was heavily relied upon to catch errors, but now errors are handled much more verbosely. Many fault conditions previously did not make lbmk exit at all, let alone with non-zero status, and zero status was sometimes being returned under some edge cases that were tested. Error handling is more robust now.
util/ich9utils (containing ich9gen) was removed, thus eliminating about 3000 source lines (of C code) from lbmk. The nvmutil program, also provided by and originating from the Canoeboot project, can already change GbE MAC addresses. Coreboot’s bincfg can generate ich9m descriptors, and ifdtool can manipulate them; so the features provided by ich9utils were superfluous, since they are available in other projects that we ship. We now ship pre-built ifd/gbe configs on these machines, which can be modified or re-assembled manually if you want to. This eliminates a moving part from Canoeboot, and speeds up the build a little bit.
ROM images (of coreboot) build much faster: no-payload coreboot ROMs are cached on disk, as are payloads, where previously only the latter was cached. These cached images have as much inserted into them as possible, to eliminate redundant steps in the build process. The elf directory contains these, and the existing bin directory still holds the full ROM images (containing payloads) when compiled.
GRUB payload: vastly reduced the size of the payload, by eliminating GRUB modules that were not needed. About 100KB of compressed space saved in flash!
GRUB payload: argon2 key derivation supported - this means LUKS2 decryption is now possible in GRUB. This work was performed by Nicholas Johnson, rebasing from Axel’s AUR patch for GRUB 2.06 (Canoeboot currently uses GRUB 2.12).
The new coding style is now used on many more scripts, including the build/boot/roms_helper script - the new style is much cleaner, mandating that logic be top-down, with a main() function defined; it’s basically inspired by the OpenBSD coding style for C programs, adapted to shell scripts.
All GRUB keymaps now included; a single grub.elf is now used on all ROM images. The grub.cfg goes in GRUB memdisk now, but can be overridden by inserting a grub.cfg in CBFS; many behaviours are also controlled this way, for example to change keymaps and other behaviours. This results in much faster builds, because a different GRUB payload doesn’t have to be added to each new ROM image; such takes time, due to time-expensive LZMA compression. This, plus the optimised set of GRUB modules, also makes GRUB itself load much faster. All of the fat has been trimmed, though still quite a lot more than a Crumb.
A lot of scripts have been removed entirely, and their logic not replaced; in many cases, Canoeboot’s build system contained logic that had gone unused for many years.
More reliable configs now used on desktop mainboards: SeaBIOS-only for start, but GRUB still available where feasible (in the SeaBIOS menu). This makes it more fool proof for a user who might use integrated graphics and then switch to a graphics card; the very same images will work.
TMPDIR environmental variable now set, and exported from main parent process when running lbmk; child processes inherit it, and a single tmp dir is used. This is then automatically cleaned, upon exit from lbmk; previously, lbmk did not cleanly handle /tmp at all, but now it’s pretty reliable.

Hardware supported in this release

All of the following are believed to boot, but if you have any issues, please contact the Canoeboot project. They are:

Servers (AMD, x86)

Desktops (AMD, Intel, x86)

Laptops (Intel, x86)

Dell Latitude E6400 (easy to flash, no disassembly, similar hardware to X200/T400)
ThinkPad X60 / X60S / X60 Tablet
ThinkPad T60 (with Intel GPU)
Lenovo ThinkPad X200 / X200S / X200 Tablet
Lenovo ThinkPad X301
Lenovo ThinkPad R400
Lenovo ThinkPad T400 / T400S
Lenovo ThinkPad T500
Lenovo ThinkPad W500
Lenovo ThinkPad R500
Apple MacBook1,1 and MacBook2,1

Laptops (ARM, with U-Boot payload)

Downloads

You can find this release on the downloads page. At the time of this announcement, some of the rsync mirrors may not have it yet, so please check another one if your favourite one doesn’t have it.

Special changes

Besides deblobbing, there are two critical differences in how Canoeboot’s build system works in this release, versus the Libreboot 20231021 build system:

Single-tree git submodules are not downloaded in Canoeboot; none of them are used in the Libreboot release, but using them simplified config/git/ because many of those entries were defined as submodules by each given project; in some serprog-related repositories, proprietary drivers get downloaded that are never actually compiled or executed in any way. Rather than deblob these in Canoeboot, the Canoeboot build system simply skips downloading those repositories altogether.
Thus, several entries in under config/git/ for Canoeboot 20231026, that do not exist under Libreboot 20231021.

This quirk is only a minor difference. Severals scripts that handled dependencies for building non-FSDG-compliant boards (such as blob download scripts) have been excluded in this Canoeboot release, because they are not needed.

As a result, the Canoeboot build system is about 1250 sloc when counting shell scripts of the build system; the Libreboot build system is about 1750. This comparison is between Canoeboot 20231026 and Libreboot 20231021 - by contrast, Libreboot 20230625 was 3388 sloc, and GNU Boot 0.1 RC is 2111 sloc (counting shell scripts, because it uses the same design as lbmk and cbmk).

That ~1250 sloc in Canoeboot is with all the extra features such as serprog integration and U-Boot support (on actual mainboards, that you can flash it with). The build system in Canoeboot 20231026 is extremely efficient.

Backports

In addition to the Libreboot 20231021 changes, the following Libreboot patches were backported into this Canoeboot release, from Libreboot revisions pushed after the Libreboot 20231021 release came out:

Changes NOT included in this release

These entries are from the Libreboot 20231021 change log, but these changes are not present in the Canoeboot 20231026 release:

Better integrity checking when downloading vendor files
Scrubbing of vendor files now handled by the inject script, rather than the release script. This enables more robust handling of configs pertaining to vendor files, that tell lbmk where the files are and how to insert them; it therefore follows that this same script should be used to delete them.
Unified handling of git/vendor config files, containing URLs, revisions, checksums and so on. This is handled by a single function under include/option.sh
Intel ME extraction is now provided in one function, instead of two, when downloading vendor files per mainboard, before running it through me_cleaner
Unified checking of the destination file, when downloading vendor updates. This results in more reliable checking of whether a vendor file has already been downloaded or not, where it is only handled if missing.
Vendor scripts: archive extraction is now unified, the same method used for each archive. This enables more robust checking of hashes and so on.
More deeply integrated the Intel MRC download script (from coreboot) into Canoeboot’s vendor scripts, removing its download logic and re-using that from Canoeboot’s scripts instead; now, the MRC script only contains extraction logic, and it is an include file, rather than a standalone script.
Where no-microcode ROM images are provided, ensure that the ROM hashes still match when running the vendor inject script. This is only useful on the Dell Latitude E6400, which is otherwise FSDG-compatible but (in Canoeboot) comes with or without microcode updates, and with or without the Nvidia VGA ROM (handled by vendor inject/download scripts) for dGPU variants. Verification previously failed, under certain conditions, when inserting that VGA ROM.
Vendor scripts: don’t use /tmp for ROM images when inserting vendor files. In case /tmp is a tmpfs and not much RAM is available, it is paramount that the user’s file system is used instead, where there is likely greater capacity; it is done under tmp/ in lbmk (not to be confused with /tmp).
move me7_updater_parser.py to util/ (not under script/)
The directory containing vendor files no longer exists in lbmk, because it is instead created when needed; the ifd/gbe files were moved to config/ifd so the vendorfile directory became redundant.
Don’t support removal of microcode (during release time) on untested targets. Set microcode_required="y" on most boards, but leave it set to "n" on platfroms such as GM45 (ThinkPad X200/T400, Dell E6400, etc); anything FSDG compatible, in other words.
Improved Dell Latitude E6400 support; the same image now provides iGPU and dGPU support, since it’s SeaBIOS-only anyway, so a VGA ROM is inserted into the same ROM that also enables libgfxinit, enabling the Intel or Nvidia GPU to be used (if the VGA ROM is missing, only the Intel GPU will work)
Only remove microcode (where that behaviour is enabled per board) in release ROMs, but not during build time. This results in reduced disk usage during development, but release archives still contain the no-microcode option if you want to use that; manual removal is also still possible, during development.
Copy dl_path, don’t move it, when downloading and extracting a vendor file. This reduces the change of it being missing later when lbmk is run again.
Improved handling of vendor file hashes; previously, the backup would only be tried if the first one failed to download, but if the first file succeeded and yet had a bad hash, the backup would not be tried. Now the backup is tried when either the first download fails OR it has a bad hash, making downloads of vendor files more resilient to network failure.
When extracting ME files from vendors, more types of archives are supported for decompression at build time.
Fixed bug where vendor files were always being downloaded from backup URLs at build time.
Spoof the user agent string mimicking that of Tor Browser, when downloading vendor files at build time. This circumvents restrictions based on user agent string, when lbmk interacts with certain HTTP servers.
Abort (with non-zero exit) if KBC1126 EC firmware fails to download at build time.
Haswell (libre MRC) coreboot tree: fixed acpica downloads, which no longer work on the upstream URL. Old acpica binaries now hosted on Canoeboot rsync.
Blobutil: generally more reliable now at downloading vendor files, especially under fault conditions; for example, if a download failed before, it’d try a backup link, but now it also tries the backup link if main download succeeds but checksum verification didn’t; and SHA512 checksums are now used, for greater security, whereas nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 used sha1sum (now we use sha512sum). A user agent is specified in wegt, matching that used by Tor Browser (which in turn mimics Firefox running on Windows). This is needed for some vendors, which seem to dislike wget’s default user agent.

Excluded mainboards

The following boards are missing in Canoeboot 20231026, but are supported in the Libreboot 20231021 release; this is because they do not comply with FSDG policy:

Dell Latitude E6430
Dell Precision T1650
HP EliteBook 2170p
HP EliteBook 2560p
HP EliteBook 2570p
HP EliteBook 8470p
HP 8200 SFF
HP 8300 USDT
HP EliteBook 9470m
Lenovo ThinkPad T420
Lenovo ThinkPad T420S
Lenovo ThinkPad T430
Lenovo ThinkPad T440p
Lenovo ThinkPad T520
Lenovo ThinkPad T530
Lenovo ThinkPad W530
Lenovo ThinkPad W541
Lenovo ThinkPad X220/X220T
Lenovo ThinkPad X230/X230T

Removed/modified code, in the build system

Again, certain features cannot be merged from Libreboot and into Canoeboot, because of the restrictions set by Canoeboot policy (adhering to GNU FSDG). Here is an overview of the code present in Libreboot 20231021 that is missing in Canoeboot 20231026:

coreboot and u-boot download scripts: Binary blobs are now removed during download. A list of blobs is programmed into the build system, based on scanning of each tree with the linux-libre deblob-check script. (yes, it works on other code bases, besides Linux). This means that most mainboards no longer compile, in coreboot, and many u-boot targets no longer compile.
build/roms: These scripts build ROM images. For zero-blob boards, in other words boards that do not require binary blobs, regular Libreboot inserts CPU microcode by default, but copies each ROM to produce a corresponding, parallel zero-blobs version without CPU microcode. This censored version of Libreboot modifies the script in the following way: since the coreboot and uboot download scripts remove blobs anyway, including CPU microcode, the default compiled ROMs exclude microcode. Therefore, this version simply removes that logic, because it’s not needed.
blobutil: Anything pertaining to the downloading of vendor blobs has been removed. This includes me_cleaner, ME7 Update Parser and the like. It is not needed, in this version of Libreboot. Directories such as resources/blobs/ (containing code and config data) has been removed. In regular Libreboot, there are certain required binary blobs that we cannot legally distribute on certain mainboards, so blobutil auto-downloads them from the vendor while compiling ROM images, then it processes them (if needed) and inserts them; the scripts that produce release archives will delete these blobs, for the release, and those same scripts can be re-run on release ROMs, to re-insert binary blobs. It is completely automated, removing any need for manual intervention by the user, thus saving hours of time in some cases. Blobutil snaps them up like that and everything Just Works. It does this for many different types of blobs, including: Intel ME, Intel MRC, HP KBC1126 EC firmware, VGA ROMs - you just run 1 command on 1 ROM (or an entire collection of ROMs) and it does it, automatically detecting what is needed for the given ROM image, per mainboard definition. Very easy to use. This highly innovative technology does not exist in Censored Libreboot.
Blobs: Removed Intel Flash Descriptors and GbE configuration files. These are non-copyrightable, non-software blobs, just binary-encoded config. They are not needed, in this Libreboot version. NOTE: ICH9M ones remain, because they are needed (but they are not software).
Blobs: Anything downloaded and inserted by blobutil, during the build process or post-release in the Libreboot build system. This includes: Intel ME firmware, Intel MRC firmware, HP KBC1126 EC firmware and VGA option ROM for Nvidia GPU variant of Dell Latitude E6400.
lbmk: Code that executes blob-related scripts has been removed.
Patches: Any custom coreboot patches, for mainboards that require binary blobs, have been removed. They are not needed in this Libreboot version.
update/release: correspondingly deleted files are no longer copied by these scripts (they are the scripts that generate tar archives for Libreboot releases, after everything is compiled). The build logic no longer bothers to scrub non-redistributable inserted binary blobs from certain ROM images, because 1) those corresponding mainboards are no longer supported anyway and 2) the logic for downloading/inserting those blobs no longer exists. So there’s nothing to do.

It’s not actually a lot of code that was removed. The actual diff that did this is very large, because it also removed the coreboot configs for the removed boards, and those configs are very large.

Libreboot is superior to Canoeboot, in every way. You should use Libreboot. Use of Canoeboot is even dangerous, because lack of microcode updates in Canoeboot could potentially lead to data loss due to memory corruption.

Read more about the Binary Blob Reduction Policy of the Libreboot project. The Canoeboot project is provided as a proof of concept, to demonstrate just how awful Libreboot used to be, before it implement the new policy in November 2022.

Canoeboot is a worthless project, but engineered to a high standard. It’s necessary to do this, because there are some people who won’t adequately see the problem unless it actually exists; Canoeboot is not a problem, because it’s not the only choice, but there was a time when osboot didn’t even exist, let alone the new Libreboot, and the other more pragmatic coreboot distros do not support as much hardware as Libreboot does today.

You should use Libreboot, even if your hardware is compatible with Canoeboot. I make these Canoeboot releases, specifically so that I have something to crap all over. I could criticise GNU Boot more heavily, but GNU Boot is even more inferior; I make Canoeboot as good as it can feasibly be at any point in time, and criticise that result. My arguments are stronger when an example exists, especially a strong example such as Canoeboot. If the best possible solution is still inferior, then that will further invalidate the even lesser solutions, and that is the entire purpose of Canoeboot; I do Canoeboot releases, specifically so that I can crap all over them. I’m allowed to do that if it’s mine.

I say again. Canoeboot is inferior.

Download Libreboot 20231021 instead.

Censored Libreboot 20230710 release

On this day, the websites of Censored Libreboot and nonGeNUine Boot are being redirected (HTTP 301 return) to the Canoeboot website.

An archive of nonGeNU 20230717’s announcement is contained on this website, but not Censored Libreboot 20230717; it was virtually identical to nonGeNUine Boot 20230717, the latter of which was just a re-brand of Censored Libreboot.

If you do want to see either nonGeNU or C-Libreboot, go to these links:

And for nonGeNUine Boot, though the code (website and code) is included in the Canoeboot repositories, here are the original repositories:

You can find the actual software release archives for nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 and Censored Libreboot 20230710 under Libreboot rsync mirrors, in the canoeboot directory. They have been moved there, from where they were previously hosted.

Post-release errata

The following binary blobs were overlooked, and are still present in the release archive for Canoeboot 20231101 and 20231026; this mistake was corrected, in the Canoeboot 20231103 release, so you should use that if you don’t want these files. They are, thus:

src/coreboot/default/3rdparty/stm/Test/FrmPkg/Core/Init/Dmar.h
src/coreboot/fam15h_rdimm/src/vendorcode/intel/fsp1_0/baytrail/absf/minnowmax_1gb.absf
src/coreboot/fam15h_rdimm/src/vendorcode/intel/fsp1_0/baytrail/absf/minnowmax_2gb.absf
src/coreboot/fam15h_udimm/src/vendorcode/intel/fsp1_0/baytrail/absf/minnowmax_1gb.absf
src/coreboot/fam15h_udimm/src/vendorcode/intel/fsp1_0/baytrail/absf/minnowmax_2gb.absf
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_err.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_gap.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_gatt.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_gattc.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_gatts.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_hci.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_l2cap.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_ranges.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/ble_types.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_error.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_error_sdm.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_error_soc.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_nvic.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_sdm.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_soc.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf_svc.h
src/pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb/hw/mcu/nordic/nrf5x/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_API/include/nrf52/nrf_mbr.h

Thanks go to Craig Topham, who is the Copyright and Licensing Associate at the Free Software Foundation; you can find his entry on the FSF staff page. Craig is the one who reported these.

The Canoeboot 20231026 and 20231101 release tarballs will not be altered, but errata has now been added to the announcement pages for those releases, to let people know of the above issue.

You are advised, therefore, to use the Canoeboot 20231103 release.

Update on 12 November 2023:

This file was also overlooked, and is still present in the release tarball:

src/vendorcode/amd/agesa/f12/Proc/GNB/Nb/Family/LN/F12NbSmuFirmware.h

This has now been removed, in the Canoeboot git repository (cbmk.git), and this file will absent, in the next release after Canoeboot 20231107. Thanks go to Denis Carikli who reported this. The patch to fix it is here:

https://codeberg.org/canoeboot/cbmk/commit/70d0dbec733c5552f8cd6fb711809935c8f3d2f3

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