Canoeboot 25.04 "Corny Calamity" released! (free/libre BIOS/UEFI firmware replacement based on coreboot)

Hi everyone,

My name is Leah Rowe. I am the founder and lead developer of the Canoeboot project, which is my special Libreboot fork that provides free and libre boot firmware, based on coreboot. It is a *distro* of coreboot, in much the same way that, say, Trisquel or Parabola are GNU/Linux-libre distributions. Its purpose is to make free BIOS/UEFI boot firmware accessible for non-technical users.

It provides several coreboot "payloads" by default, such as the GNU boot loader named GRUB, or SeaBIOS. It also provides U-Boot, which implements a lightweight and sensible UEFI layer. These payloads can be selected at boot time, with different images that boot one of them as primary.

I maintain this project because I'm a passionate free software developer, and I want people to use it. I've been maintaining Canoeboot now for the past two years, as a fork of my other project named Libreboot, which is superficially similar.

The new release announcement is here:

https://canoeboot.org/news/canoeboot2504.html

Highlights:

* Acer Q45T-AM added
* All major upstream sources updated (e.g. coreboot, GRUB) as of 20 April 2025
* Many security fixes and bugfixes in GRUB
* Build fixes; the release was successfully compiled on bleeding edge distros, with the new GCC 15
* Build system improvements, especially error handling
* More reliable vendor file insertion

Incremental changes including more boards planned, for the next June 2025 release.

More information is available in the ChangeLog linked above.

One of the special improvements is that several bleeding edge distros were tested, namely: Fedora 42, and Debian Sid (*with experimental* dependencies including GCC 15). Libre bleeding edge distros like Parabola are also expected to work perfectly, in compiling Canoeboot from source.

One of the problems with the previous December release was precisely that the new GCC 15 and other toolchains are much stricter about certain coding styles and especially about warnings (more are treated as errors). I and several others have aggressively tested for and ironed out these bugs. This also applies for example to the ASUS KGPE-D16 port, where I made several changes, even crazy ones such as updating to the latest nasm (for parts of coreboot that are in x86 assembly language), because the old one used on that board would not properly compile in GCC 15.

Everything works perfectly. Enjoy!

If you have any questions about the release, I'm on the #canoeboot channel on Libera IRC, or name at domain on Mastodon.

Happy hacking!