Marcus's Blog
Free Software, Free Hardware, Free Society
Why you should avoid autoboot
Recently I have discovered a new project called Autoboot which is a fork of Libreboot (including website design) that adds Blobs again.
The idea of Libreboot is to offer a fully Free (as in speech) BIOS, avoiding any blobs. This is why proprietary code like the Intel AMT blobs or the CPU microcode has been removed. The disadvantage of this removal is that only a limited number of boards is supported at the moment (see hardware compatibility list). The Libreboot team is working hard to continuously increase the number of supported devices, but there are some limitations, as removal of the AMT code in post 2008 Lenovo machines is a difficult task (might even be impossible). Most recent additions have been some AMD based mainboards which do not have those kind of limitations.
Autoboot makes use of the Libreboot build system (which is of course available under a Free License) and skips the Blob removal in order to support a larger number of devices. If your Freedom is important to you, you should not use this BIOS versions. If you are a developer, who is interested in User Freedom, you should join the Libreboot project in order to support more hardware. Upstream development happens in Coreboot and this is where nearly all Libreboot patches are landing as well.