YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

97 points iamnothere 1 hour ago 40 comments

kyrra 1 hour ago | parent

They don't seem to like AI.

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

relativeadv 1 hour ago | parent

good!

raverbashing 1 hour ago | parent

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

ur-whale 58 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

Cakez0r 52 minutes ago | parent

But they're doing it under the banner of the libre software movement, whose raison d'être is free (as in liberty) software. Having political strings attached is antithetical to the movement.

afavour 50 minutes ago | parent

Libre software is a political movement. And it makes sense for libre contributors to be highly skeptical of a tool that may or may not violate copyright, profits from the work of other libre codebases and is controlled by tech giants.

IslandRebel 47 minutes ago | parent

I'd rather have the project that works, rather than one that has the correct political stance.

You can look at what being achieved right now with AI, GoW3 (an absolute master piece BTW) on the PS4 Remaster can be played on Linux at 120FPS thanks to some decompilation/reverse engineering framework with AI.

I am generally also fed up of politics (whatever they are) forced into projects.

Also AI doesn't make you stupid. It is bullshit, he has cherry picked information to sooth his own biases.

afavour 51 minutes ago | parent

Someone can always fork it if they find themselves sufficiently outraged.

creata 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

bigfishrunning 34 minutes ago | parent

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

gorkish 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

versooth 3 minutes ago | parent

Libreboot is not a fork of Coreboot.

It's a distribution. That is, they build and distribute firmware images. Coreboot just ships source.

Coreboot's docs lists the variety of distributions: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html

ketzu 1 hour ago | parent

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.

doublepg23 40 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

BowBun 35 minutes ago | parent

It is indeed a list, though not everyone will use it the same way!

ImaCake 1 hour ago | parent

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.

p-e-w 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

ImaCake 53 minutes ago | parent

Yeah its quite the contrast to the recent QGIS core "no AI" policy that very pointedly had no emotive language at all.

trollbridge 24 minutes ago | parent

Likewise, it if claims something is “vibe coded” when it clearly is not (such as U-Boot).

Agentic AI has allowed 86Box to make massive strides forward. This includes a substantial contribution to emulate the Intel Inboard 386 that was created by someone who describes himself as a non-programmer. The community is now bigger and stronger, although we’ve had some aches and pains with slop AI generated PRs.

The same goes for Gravity Linux which is booting in my M4 Macs with working GPU and most other peripherals. What used to take years now takes weeks, so we can do much more thorough testing and ultimately have a better end product.

AdmiralAsshat 10 minutes ago | parent

You realize that it is their "radicalism" that gives us the Libreboot project to begin with, right?

cwiggs 6 minutes ago | parent

Hah! Glad I'm not the only one who has this theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104114

cwiggs 7 minutes ago | parent

It's possible this type of "radical" behavior is why this project exists in the first place. I'm willing to bet if the Libreboot maintainer(s) were not "radical" they'd just be using a Mac and be content with a closed source bootloader.

Not to say this "radical" behavior is helpful, and I understand why people don't like it.

john_strinlai 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

ChickeNES 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

Cider9986 39 minutes ago | parent

I can't use 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.

trollbridge 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

doublerabbit 28 minutes ago | parent

Okay? Their repo, their rules.

Fork it and use Ai if you have a problem.

jgarzik 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

bakugo 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

sarjann 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

AdmiralAsshat 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

slingvora 57 minutes ago | parent

Getting Libreboot running on a Pixel would be a pretty wild second life for a phone that was never meant to be a Chromebook.

AdmiralAsshat 55 minutes ago | parent

Wrong Pixel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook_Pixel

uproarchat 13 minutes ago | parent

Also the Pixelbook :)

iamnothere 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

cwiggs 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

iamnothere 5 minutes ago | parent

It’s great to see this happening at the same time—Heads would be a great complement to Libreboot. Thanks for your work on this.