Librebooting the ThinkPad T480
10 points by runxiyu
10 points by runxiyu
I'm reading about the community. They sound less than friendly. And the process seems simply not worth it. It's a nice idea but all those mean IRC people getting annoyed with one wouldn't do much for adoption of the platform.
Wow.
I started it, but once I saw how long it was, and TBH how hard, I skipped to the end.
I like the idea of all-FOSS firmware very much, but it does look to me like the state of the art involves a lot of work, and in return, you lose functionality and compatibility. That's not a good tradeoff to me. Am I wrong?
When I've looked at these things, I've come to a similar conclusion. What we need is for this to be the standard from the manufacturer. We need devices that ship this way instead of requiring us to jump through hoops to open it up. I wish hardware manufacturers just manufactured hardware and that all software (including firmware) was open source and maintained by everyone.
There are a few coreboot boards that are much more open by default, without resorting to such exhausting workarounds (such as "neutering" Intel's management engine, which is the main cause for loss in functionality), and I sometimes wondered if the vendors behind those chipsets wouldn't appreciate support (and sales) more than Intel/Lenovo.
But then, people found it worth their time, so who am I to complain?
Apparently, libreboot boots much faster. But yeah, I think it's not compelling at the moment on non-friendly hardware.
(I have a X1 Carbon gen3 and the BIOS is... not great... it's slow and it seems... unreliable at times. I'd love a BIOS that could browse ISOs on external storage and boot them without headaches... or something that could netboot over wifi...)
I saw the T480 support and my interest was piqued- mostly because I'd like to get a T480 anyway, but it's too much work for me right now.
There's apparently some guys who will do the work for you for a small fee.
I just learned about Minifree Ltd that offers t480 with Libreboot installed: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t480.html. Could be an interesting option for some folks.
I'd love a BIOS that could browse ISOs on external storage and boot them without headaches
While that sounds interesting, have you tried Ventoy?
I have used it, but I've also had many issues with it. So many I wrote my own thing. But my thing is a bit unpractical for normal people.
I have listed some alternatives here too.
Gosh. OK then.
What issues did you have? I have found a few -- NetBSD and AROS don't work, some Fedora derivatives that do arcane stuff I don't want on my PC, and more -- but it remains very useful.
Basically that. Some ISOs just don't work with Ventoy, at least on my X1 Carbon Gen3. There's only so much you can do without simulating hardware- some boot ISOs won't work only through software.
The iODD devices look great. The Pi vKVMs can also do this kind of stuff. Everything that presents something that looks like a USB drive, or a CD/DVD just works, including my RPI hack.