Martin Roth posted a new entry on the coreboot blog, announcing coreboot 4.6, excerpting his announcement below, see the full announcement here:
http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2017/05/08/announcing-coreboot-4-6/
The full announcement is many pages long, too long to properly summarize.
“Since the last release in October 2016, the coreboot project had 1708 commits by 121 authors.”
There’s a new payload called cbui:
“We provide the libpayload project which is used for writing own payloads from scratch. The library is MOSTLY licensed under BSD and recently received new functionality in order to prepare for the upcoming replacement for the old nvramcui payload. This new payload is called cbui and is based on the nuklear graphics library including keyboard and mouse support. The cbui payload is currently expected to be merged into the main coreboot tree before the next release. The upstream repository is here: https://github.com/siro20/coreboot/tree/cbui/payloads/cbui “
coreboot now integrates ME Cleaner in it’s build system, and has a new tool called blobtool:
“Fighting blobs and proprietary HW components: coreboot’s ultimate goal would be to replace any closed source firmware stack with free software components. Unfortunately this is not always possible due to signed binaries such as the Intel ME firmware, the AMD PSP and microcode. Recently, a way was discovered to let the Intel ME run in a functional error state and reduce it from 1.5/5MB to 80KB. It’s not perfect but it works from Nehalem up to Skylake based Intel systems. The tool is now integrated into the coreboot build system. The upstream repository is https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner “
“Another ongoing improvement is the new utility blobtool. It is currently used for generating the flash descriptor and GbE configuration data on older mainboard which are known to be free software. It can easily be extended for different binaries with well-defined specifications.”
coreboot supports the Ada programming langauge:
“coreboot now supports Ada, and a lot work was done integrating Ada into our toolchain. At the moment only the support for formal verification is missing and will be soon added. At that point, we can prove the absence of runtime errors in our Ada code. In short, everybody can start developing Ada code for our project. The existing Ada code which can be used from now on is another native graphics initialization which will replace in the long term the current implementation. The native graphics code supports all Intel platforms up to skylake. We offer support for HDMI, VGA, DVI and DP external interfaces as well and is ready to be integrated into our mainboard implementations.”
Firmware Security 