Libreboot 26.10 "Ominous Olive" released with UEFI, Chromebook support

4 days ago (libreboot.org)

Everyone’s focusing on the AI policy (perhaps because Leah for some reason said this was the most important part of the release), but the UEFI/EDK integration and Chromebook support is a massive step forward. Suddenly Libreboot has multiplied the devices available by many times, and future devices will be much easier to add. This is huge.

They don't seem to like AI.

https://codeberg.org/libreboot/lbmk/src/branch/master/AGENTS...

  • They REALLY don't like AI, to the point of "wish I didn't need to rely on GCC and GRUB because they have AI in them" levels of hate AI. See this further down the linked page:

    >The fork in question, of U-Boot, is heavily AI vibe-coded and thus useless to Libreboot. This is not mere conjecture; in said aforementioned U-Boot mailing list thread, the author stated thus. We will not, in any way, encourage or facilitate use of AI. It has been made clear that several projects Libreboot uses also have some AI-assisted commits; GCC, GRUB, etc. This is not our fault, but it is my intention that I and others will audit these projects in the future, de-slopping them and possibly even forking them entirely for that very reason.

    • > U-Boot upstream itself is staunchly anti-AI, at least at the time of this release, and much discussion of the above was had on their mailing list.

      I saw this as well, which is funny because I've sent plenty of patches written using AI assistance to upstream U-Boot. It was my understanding that U-Boot was mostly following kernel conventions in general as many U-Boot drivers share code(in addition to the actual subsystem maintainers themselves) with their kernel equivalents.

    • I have learned to treat statements like that as a general red flag.

      Someone who acts like a radical on practical issues will almost certainly act like a radical in other areas as well - including areas that matter to me.

      There are debates to be had on every technology, but foaming-at-the-mouth kind of talk is a sure sign of a maintainer (and by extension a project) I want nothing to do with.

      I respect projects with a no AI policy, but if that policy starts with the words “fuck no”, I’m out of there.

      58 replies →

    • > de-slopping them and possibly even forking

      Or, hear me out, they could instead just improve and contribute the code they think is suboptimal

      20 replies →

    • Uboot on x86 is like a snowplow on a hatchback. Sure, it can work, but why?

      Grub is more extensively used and has a lot of features. Or boot Linux on UEFI using a UKI executable without any bootloader.

    • How terrible. I'm sitting on multiple AI reverse engineered firmwares that I'm not sure what to do with. I suppose they'll never make it to upstream now. My only option is to ask AI to integrate this stuff.

      5 replies →

  • Some of that reads really funny.

    Also

    > https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

    Feels more like a software discovery list than an indictment. Thanks for the categorization.

    • > software discovery list

      You're not kidding, I feel like this is better than most of those awesome-X lists that were popular for a while.

    • Yeah, I saw this "open-slopware" list listing many battle-tested web servers as "permissive AI policy", while one of the alternatives (not all though, some inherit battle-testing) isn't really battle-tested. In fact, I saw entangled codebase and not-so-good coding practices.

    • This list seems...odd. For instance, the list decries the permissive AI policy of the Linux kernel, of Fedora, of Bazzite/Bluefin/etc...and then includes Secureblue as an alternative...?

      Secureblue is a neat project, but as you say, this would make more sense as a generic discovery list. If you want to avoid projects with a permissive AI policy, you should probably take into account that Secureblue is based on bluebuild (from the Bazzite team), Fedora, Linux, etc etc etc.

  • you arent kidding!

    >"think AI makes you super hacker? think again: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089"

    not that im particularly pro-ai, but it seems a bit silly to rely on a paper about early-2025 ai when people are using late-2026 ai, given how different they are.

    • The interesting thing about that paper, I would have said, was the _perception_ gap; people believed that it was making them more productive even when it was doing the opposite. That effect presumably hasn’t gone away.

    • It takes time to research and publish. It'll always be some slightly old model. Is this argument just a permanent get out of jail free card? Add 10 to each year, will we be seeing that said in the future?

      1 reply →

  • There is a respectable way to approach this and this.

    The right way is something like, we've been getting spammed with a bunch of PR's from AI that we find difficult to review (because AI allows the average bob who isn't technically minded to make a PR). We have therefore decided not to allow AI submissions.

    ---

    I think the people who have some moral / ideological issue and bring that into projects kind of feel like clowns to me. I agree with Linus that the point is to make something that people find useful, and obviously you want it to be maintainable.

    Saying "it makes you dumber etc" is not related to the project, with all due respect it's non of your fucking business how I learn / retain skills.

    • Free Software was a moral & ideological issue to Stallman.

      I feel people have the right to bring any sort of issue into the projects they make. Nobody is forced to participate.

    • I get it, but everything is ideological -- whether you want to hear about it or not.

      In a world where software exerts considerable control and influence over peoples' lives, your ability to insulate yourself from that influence is a priveledge. Software IS ideological. Free software was created so people can have the freedom to share and collaborate on their own terms. There is an extent to which it gets extreme, but without the GPL we would live in an even more monopolistic "free" market hell world than we already do. That's a moral obligation that spawned a practical one. If no one ever took a moral stance because you find it annoying, the world would be an objectively worse place.

    • I always find these sorts of responses fascinating. “Oh no people are being mean about our lovely robots!!” Like, people are entitled to dislike and be sceptical of LLMs.

      1 reply →

  • Yeah, the (poisoned) AGENTS.md file reads lots like "f*ck AI", which feels like anti-AI dogmatism for me. If I really wanted to use this project, I would use Coreboot instead or fork it to remove proprietary blobs.

  • I can't use critical software that rejects AI to this degree for privacy reasons.

    You can't expect to sufficiently protect your users privacy when not using AI for finding vulnerabilities.

    Same thing with Asahi Linux with their highly anti-AI stance. I had a bit of hope when I saw someone was making an LLM assisted fork but it's not the same support.

    While MacOS is likely becoming much more secure, Linux distros that reject AI would fall even further behind, if that's possible.

    Edit: added critical

    • Ai and privacy in the same sentence is wierd. You supported your argument, I guess, but unless you are using local ai, the developer would be sacrificing their own privacy.

      6 replies →

    • The current hope is to eventually upstream the “fork” (Gravity) into the Linux kernel. The Asahi project can continue to run in parallel.

      The Linux kernel extensively uses AI now; most lkml submissions have an Assisted-by: LLM tag.

      3 replies →

  • Unfortunately this is bad for one of my projects, a slop detector extension... it assumes that AGENTS.md be short in size to say stuff like "You may view and use this code but not edit or commit anything"... this rant is long enough that it classifies as slop itself!

  • I find this hilarious since I'm actively having my clankers work on porting EDK2 to an SoC that's used in a Chromebook, though not the ones mentioned here.

    • Are you publishing anywhere that I can follow? In particular, it would be really helpful if you could publish the prompts and workflow, so that the rest of us can more quickly use it to replicate your work on other machines:)

      (Signed, the owner of several Chromebooks in need of better firmware)

  • Cool, that's why open source projects get left behind. The attitude

    • I think it's better that some people have strong opinions. For example, the world would suck if everyone was rms, but he has nevertheless had a positive impact on the world imo.

      2 replies →

    • > Cool, that's why open source projects get left behind. The attitude

      They're making a political choice. It's a free country, and more power to them.

      It's not a choice that I necessarily agree with, but one that may - who knows - prove prescient 5 years down the road.

      No one can predict the future, that's what politics are partly about and the reason why diversity of opinion of choice matters.

      Do you have a crystal ball?

      11 replies →

    • Agree in general, though with Libreboot the pedantry is more or less the point of the project. You fork a project and put 'libre' in the name, I personally see that as a statement of dedication and expect you to stick to those guns. The experiment isnt much of an experiment otherwise.

      Coreboot still exists.

      1 reply →

    • When the alternative is being surrounded by rabid AI enthusiasts who absolutely lose their shit whenever anyone says "no" to them, being left behind is a great choice.

    • And yet people who are training models need more and more open source software to feed the beast. Quite the conundrum.

  • I can't be the only one who thinks the way they handled that is incredibly disrespectful right?

    It's their own business to disallow AI contributions. But instead of adding that to the Code Of Conduct they chose to knowingly misuse a file to target a group of people they don't like.

    If I want to use AI on my copy of that repo, I have to delete that file and consider if the developer has added any more of what is (by intent) basically malware to the source code. Sure the file is just an unhinged rant, but now I have to wonder if they attempted to put some prompt injection in the repo.

    • “If I want to crawl a website with a robots file that says ‘fuck off’, I have to ignore the robots file. If I want to use AGPL code as part of a commercial web service without creating my source, I have to ignore the license.”

      Like, c’mon now. This is far from the weirdest open source restriction.

      1 reply →

  • Anti-AI is rationally and logically incorrect, because it focuses on inputs, rather than outputs.

    The Linux kernel has always been focused on outcomes and outputs, which is the right focus. Here's Linus: https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/2110524360377458786

    Outputs: Code quality and long term maintenance matters. Outputs: Serving users with correctness, security and performance matters.

    Focus on "purity of input" is a faith-based political filter, not engineering.

    • Linus's take is just the same nonsensical false equivalence I've seen a million times. He sure has fallen a long way since his glory days.

      Someone should ask him if he's also planning on no longer reviewing patches to the kernel and just accepting them unconditionally, since AI is no different from a compiler after all, and nobody reviews compiler outputs.

      4 replies →

    • You say "faith-based political filter," I say "standing on principles." Your valuation of outcomes and outputs over inputs and intent is also a faith-based political filter, in that they make the value judgement that outputs are the only thing that matter when shipping a product or managing a project.

Wow, this is awesome! This relates to work I've been doing with the [Heads](https://osresearch.net/) project. Specifically I got a PR merged for the first ChromeOS Port using MrChromebox's code as an upstream dependency: https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/pull/2133

I'm now working on the 2nd ChromeOS device in this PR right now: https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/pull/2225 And there is a 3rd port by someone else: https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/pull/2219

I'm surprised Libreboot was able to add all the ChromeOS devices at once, Just adding the 2 ports for Heads hasn't been easy, although I'm not an expert when it comes to Coreboot.

Anyway, I love seeing more support for Chromebooks, they are great devices. Funny enough my Acer Chromebook (Kano) is now more open and more secure than my Framework 13s.

  • It’s great to see this happening at the same time—Heads has some important features that Libreboot lacks.

    It may be harder to port it if those features require neutered (rather than simply removed) blobs. Maybe that’s why the Libreboot port was easier? Not sure, I’m aware of the benefits that Heads provides but I don’t know much about the internals.

    Either way, thanks for your work on this.

It's refreshing to see serious open-source projects adopting a strict policy on LLM-assisted contributions.

Besides considering frontier LLMs a serious threat to humanity, I find LLM-assisted programming simply...not fun! I tolerate only AI-assisted bug reports, as they are genuinely useful.

  • I guess I'm AI centrist lol but to me, I can see a way around the 'threat' to humanity issue simply by going local and avoiding the use of datacenter ai. That might reduce the quality of code but running it on your own computer is a lot better -at least IMO.

    My issues, personally, are the IP rights issues. What was this shit trained on? When the bubble pops (as I've said a lot in this thread -I know) who's going to shake me down?

> Imported all 233 currently supported Chromebooks from the MrChromebox coreboot distro. Baytrail (Kip) tested - others need testing. Source-only in this release (must build from source, no binaries provided).

Nice. I think I loaded MrChromebox onto my Google Pixel some years ago. I should see if it can get Libreboot now.

>"Libreboot is free, open source boot firmware replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware on supported Intel/AMD and ARM64 hardware." [...] MrChromebox supports nearly every Chromebook..."

This is great news! Finally an open-source UEFI replacement which can work on nearly every Chromebook, including used/old Chromebooks!

Now, I haven't reviewed the source... it may still contain binary blobs for various drivers; I don't know. If it doesn't, then that's absolutely awesome! But if it does, then remember that having some of the UEFI firmware code open-source is a huge step forward, and it's only a matter of time before those closed-source binary blobs are reverse engineered (possibly by AI) and/or rewritten from scratch entirely, as open-source codebases...

So, a good step forward for open-source, right-to-repair, understandability of the boot chain, the Chromebook hardware ecosystem (used and new), and tranparency in general!

If it runs on Chromebooks does that mean Chromebooks can be made into generic UEFI laptops?

This is interesting given Googlebooks actually use the same boot process as Chromebooks, they just chain into aboot.

  • Yes. Even before this you could use MrChromebox's UEFI Coreboot on a lot of ChromeOS devices. You can run Linux or even Windows on them.

I'm on a libreboot-only infrastructure and can recommend. It's easy to do and you dont need to keep track of how to configure coreboot.

It just works and that's great.

Hopefully, this will end up in its foundation or even the linux one, with most motherboard manufacturers behind it.

But... it should be binary specifications with "human-like" assembly implementations since you have to remove the "compiler" issue from the SDK.

Nice! I took a 250eu chromebook, turned it into my Linux laptop perfect little machine. A bit slow but 4 cores + 8gb ram will do.

  • If you want something with more power look into the Dell Latitude 5400 Chromebook Enterprise or the Dell latitude 5300 2-in-1 Chromebook Enterprise. Both of these devices have DDR4 user replaceable memory.

    There is also the Framework 13 Chromebook edition, but that seems almost impossible to find now-a-days.

Impressive - and I have several "Edgar" class Acer chromebooks with full aluminum cases and 1920x1080p sharp screens - will be testing this out.

I thought Chromebooks natively came with Coreboot support.

  • there is upstream code but it's not well-integrated, and google's tree is largely optimised for their own payload called Deptchcharge. mrchromebox tweaks coreboot for use with edk2 so you can use normal operating systems, and the modifications that they make are extensive, e.g. mechanism in EDK2 to update EC firmware at boot time. mrchromebox is, for our purposes, a coreboot distro or indeed its own upstream. libreboot takes mrchromebox and makes several of its own modifications. "just use coreboot" is easier said than done :)

  • This is Libreboot, not Coreboot. Libreboot removes binary blobs and Intel ME. It’s a freedom-oriented distribution of Coreboot.

    • I realize that, but what's the selling point of Libreboot on Chromebooks when Coreboot is already supported, and it merely merged in support from Coreboot?

      3 replies →

Neat project. I find their new anti-AI policy to be interesting, but not at all useful to anyone. There are no objective arguments. No evidence of poor code quality in late 2026. No examples of why AI can't help the project. Just a rant.

I am very glad to see people with opinions that flow into what they do, but the question becomes: are you trying to make the best software, or make the most idealistic software? There's a big difference.

I am not at all advocating the use of straight AI slop, but with a policy like that you're opening yourself up for missed bugs, security issues, delayed features, and other things. Especially if you move away from software just because an AI wrote one line of code in it. You can still review the code. If it does the thing right, then use it!