Is libreboot a meme?

Is there any advantage to installing libreboot other than it being "free". There has to be some good reason for me to trust some software a tranny wrote to make it worthwhile for me to install it.

What am I missing Jow Forums?

Attached: 200px-Libreboot_logo.svg.png (200x200, 3K)

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fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
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faster booting if you use legacy boot
not sure if faster than uefi

Nothing.

>faster booting
lol no

faster than normal boot
total encryption of even the /boot partition

but yeah after the ad on the minifree website i wouldn't truste her either

if the NSA wants to know something about you, they will. there is no point being this much of a freetard. just hide yourself from corporations by not using facebook/microsoft/google/apple - it is convenient actually possible.

Also make sure your credit report is empty and never take out a loan for anything, don't use a phone.

That doesn't mean you have to give your data willingly, also the NSA is not as omnipresent as you think.

No it's a complete meme
coreboot can be useful but the only machines supported by libreboot are absolutely under-powered in 2018 and you have to do some serious mental gymnastics to be stuck with decade old hardware.

>Is libreboot a meme?
Yes. Jow Forums now supports the Coreboot+me_cleaner method, where you install Coreboot as the BIOS and strip the IME firmware down to the partition table and a small bit of hardware initialization firmware. The tranny is stuck on Core2 shitware while I'm enjoying my beautiful Core i series hardware with triple the speed, battery life, and chipset features.

And due to the Intel hardware flaws (most of which can be mitigated in kernel patches) I recommend moving to the new AMD Ryzen laptops and buying a Talos II POWER9 desktop.

And while we're on the subject of free and secure hardware, I've also thought about starting my business where I rent CNC machines to mill out aluminum housings for Raspberry Pis. They'd be netbook casings, where you basically toss in a screen, keyboard, Pi 3 model B+, and a battery. It would be a little bit bulky but this would allow you to put like 20k mAh worth of battery in there to run a 5v ARM computer, which would mean a week of battery life.

>free and secure hardware
>raspberry pi

Wait until risc V SoC's becomes available, otherwise you will be building a shitty macbook.

> The NSA is not as omnipresent as you think
Nice try, Paul.

I thought the only part of Raspberry Pi that needed non-free firmware was the video hardware. Is this not the case?

>Wait until risc V SoC's becomes available
I'd just modify the designs slightly or offer 3D printed plastic internal mounts for the RISC-V boards if they're smaller.

>Just surrender all your data, you can't protect yourself anyways.

fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

It's the bootloader that's fucked up, and there's nothing like libreboot for the raspberry because of broadcom SoC.

In any case, there's faster, cheaper SBC out there like the orange Pi

I know that the onboard boot ROM loads itself into memory and then executes a binary in the root of the SD card, but is that binary not also available free software? Is the FSF just buttmad because the low level bootloader is fixed in ROM or what? Doesn't seem like a problem to me as long as it's only executing a (user modifiable) program from the SD card.

uboot is fucking open source hes a moron

Sounds comfy how much would it cost

I don't know. I haven't even gotten that far.

This thread prompted me to look more into Libreboot, see if I could install it on my Carbon X1. Looking into it I found out there's this thing called ME on newer thinkpad models that basically acts a backdoor to your whole system. Fuck Jow Forums, why did no one ever tell me this? I'm extremely tempted to throw out my X1 and go find a shitty old thinkpad after learning about this. Fuck the 'better keyboards' or whatever this is a real reason to buy into that autism.

Attached: ME.png (1064x88, 14K)

No, retard. Libreboot won't run on an X1 Carbon. You need to use Coreboot and me_cleaner. It gives you the exact same benefits of Libreboot, just on newer hardware. The tranny doesn't know its head from its ass and is stuck in 2010.

Yea I know it won't run, because of the specific thing I'm talking about here that you can't remove.

PROPRIETARY
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You obviously didn't understand my last post, nor did you attempt to look up what you didn't get. You can remove 99% of the firmware that runs in the IME, rendering it harmless. It works on nearly every new Core i series machine.

I was under the impression Libreboot couldn't work on machines with ME because it couldn't be removed without bricking the system.

>The NSA is literally god and sees everything
I am confused as to why I regularly see people on here who have this opinion. If you really thought that was true, wouldn't you be alarmed by it?

Libreboot is a fork of Coreboot, sort of. It's just Coreboot with all the non-free binaries stripped out (mostly the IME and EC firmware). The IME can't be totally removed, no. But without the proper firmware, it's not able to do anything malicious to your system. With me_cleaner you are stripping the IME firmware down to one tiny program that helps the machine boot and stay on for more than 30 minutes. This small program is harmless. The harmful parts of the IME are stored in modules that can be removed. Once the IME firmware is stripped, the region isn't writable from the OS, and even with the proper kernel drivers in the OS the IME can't communicate with anything else or reinstall any of its own firmware.

TLDR - the commie freetards lied to you by omission so they can sell you overpriced second hand Core2 shit.

Can you spoonfeed me on how to use me_cleaner? I know I need to patch my bios image, but I'm kinda lost on how to do that.

This sounds good, but do you have any sources for the fact that the small program left can't do anything malicious like act as a backdoor? This is what's most important for me.

>her

You open the laptop, locate the BIOS ROM chip, and then dump the contents with a hardware programmer. Use an appropriate SPI clip and a Raspberry Pi (other boards with GPIO pins [ground and two power] will work as long as they can also run flashrom). You run the me_cleaner script on the extracted image, then you write it back to the chip. Read the me_cleaner docs to find the appropriate flags and such. In the end you should have an untouched stock BIOS with a neutered IME firmware package.

If you have a laptop with two concatenated ROM chips for the BIOS, dump the larger one first and see if it extracts the IME image with it. Otherwise, you only need to dump the small one to get at the IME firmware. Then you strip and reflash the IME firmware only without touching the larger chip any further. I did this with my X230 with a concatenated flash.

But leaving the stock BIOS makes me_cleaner almost worthless. You should install Coreboot if it's available for your board. The X230 Core i5 3320M is a good choice because of the FOSS EC firmware that's available in the current Coreboot port.

The IME has more documentation than you'd think. The remote access and DMA related stuff is all done by programs found in the main kernel server and in other partition with programs to run things like AMT. Now stripping out the kernel would actually be good enough to render it inoperable, but me_cleaner goes further to remove all unneeded IME firmware. Basically you're left with a module called the BUP (Bring UP). It initializes hardware and does power management, and has nothing to do with the malicious parts. The BUP itself is a few hundred lines of Intel FASM. I've picked through a bit of it and I'm not worried about it.

Sorry if this is stupid, but lets say I don't have a hardware programmer, but my motherboard has a bios I can flash and extract in windows - can I pull the bios image, use me_cleaner, then flash the modified image?

My bios chip is removable and I have a backup, so if it bricks that's fine, just wondering if I'm completely off-base.

I regret installing libreboot because now I need windows and I don't want to buy another laptop.