nonGeNUine Boot

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The nonGeNUine Boot (formerly the unofficial GNU Boot or gnuboot) project provides 100% free (libre) boot firmware based on coreboot, replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware on specific Intel/AMD x86 and ARM based motherboards, including laptop and desktop computers. It initialises the hardware (e.g. memory controller, CPU, peripherals) and starts a bootloader for your operating system. GNU+Linux and BSD are well-supported. This project is a proof of concept, intended for re-use by the GNU Boot (or gnuboot) project.

NEW RELEASE: The latest release is nonGeNUine Boot 20230717, released on 17 July 2023 (as unofficial GNU Boot, later re-branded to nonGeNUine Boot on 21 July 2023) - See: nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 release announcement.

nonGeNUine Boot gives you freedoms that you otherwise can’t get with most other boot firmware, plus faster boot speeds and better security. It’s extremely powerful and configurable for many use cases. We remove binary blobs from coreboot and U-Boot, in line with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG).

We believe the freedom to study, share, modify and use software, without any restriction, is one of the fundamental human rights that everyone must have. In this context, software freedom matters. Your freedom matters. Education matters. Right to repair matters. Many people use proprietary (non-libre) boot firmware, even if they use a libre OS. Proprietary firmware often contains backdoors, and can be buggy. The nonGeNUine Boot project was founded in July 2023, with the express purpose of making coreboot firmware accessible for non-technical users.

The nonGeNUine Boot project uses coreboot for hardware initialisation. Coreboot is notoriously difficult to install for most non-technical users; it handles only basic initialization and jumps to a separate payload program (e.g. GRUB, Tianocore), which must also be configured. nonGeNUine Boot solves this problem; it is a coreboot distribution with an automated build system that builds complete ROM images, for more robust installation. Documentation is provided.

In fact, nonGeNUine Boot tries to stay as close to stock coreboot as possible, for each board, but with many different types of configuration provided automatically by the nonGeNUine Boot build system.

In the same way that Trisquel GNU+Linux is a GNU+Linux distribution, nonGeNUine Boot is a coreboot distribution. If you want to build a ROM image from scratch, you otherwise have to perform expert-level configuration of coreboot, GRUB and whatever other software you need, to prepare the ROM image. With nonGeNUine Boot, you can literally download from Git or a source archive, and run make, and it will build entire ROM images. An automated build system, named gbmk (nonGeNUineBootMaKe), builds these ROM images automatically, without any user input or intervention required. Configuration has already been performed in advance.

If you were to build regular coreboot, without using an automated build system like our one, it would require a lot more intervention and decent technical knowledge to produce a working configuration.

Regular binary releases of nonGeNUine Boot provide these ROM images pre-compiled, and you can simply install them, with no special knowledge or skill except the ability to follow simplified instructions, written for non-technical users.

Markdown file for this page: https://notgnuboot.vimuser.org/index.md

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This non-GeNUine website by Leah Rowe of Libreboot, based on Censored Libreboot c20230710, is proposed for re-use (and re-branding) by GNU Boot, a fork of Libreboot. They are (as of 17 July 2023) struggling to launch; they use very old Libreboot revisions. A nonGeNUine Boot 20230717 release is available. Despite ideological disagreement, this was a fun technical challenge. Fun fact: Libreboot 20230625 *also* provides blob-free ROMs, making nonGeNUine Boot completely pointless.