libreboot

For the past few days I’ve been reading through libreboot documentation. My goal is to put libreboot on an x220 thinkpad.

Mostly I’ve just learned that the barrier to entry with Libreboot is higher than it should be. The documentation doesn’t appear to be written from the practical perspective of how to accomplish it. Instead it’s a mix of philosophy and background information. It hasn’t been fun. I have a good feel for the theoretical approach of how to go about getting libreboot onto the x220, but little in the way of practical instructions. It’s scattered among pages that touch on it for different systems and to its detriment is full of boilerplate content and doesn’t contain everything one needs to know as a series of instructions from start to finish in one place.

Practical instructions are available in the form of tutorials, just not via the Libreboot project. It leaves me scratching my head as to what the goals of the project actually are.

In looking for better documentation I’ve also stumbled over heads and skulls. These are a bit less ambiguous about providing firmware and explaining which images are needed for which purposes and including most of the documentation necessary in the same place.

Oddly, despite the philosophical bent to libreboot, the project appears to have changed its focus around 2022. I assume it was motivated by the desire to be able to make use of more recent hardware. It seems now that there are very few systems for which proprietary-free software builds can be created.

Tags: firmware

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created: 2025-05-10

(re)generated: 2025-11-27