[coreboot] Current, BLOB free laptop available Europe?

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Hi,

Le mardi 23 mai 2017 à 08:54 +0200, Paul Menzel a écrit :
> I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> 
> Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?

The Chromebook R13 (elm) is very close to being able to boot without non-free
blobs. The only remaining blobs are the MT8173 PCM firmwares[0] in ARM Trusted
Firmware. I am working hard to liberate them and I'm very confident that it will
happen pretty soon.

However, note that the kernel will require blobs for features such as:
* hardware video decoding
* Wi-Fi and bluetooth
* GPU support

I'm also not sure about the status of the PD (USB type-C controller) chip. It
might also be running a proprietary firmware (maybe someone from the CrOS team
can clarify this).

Also, note that as usual with laptops, there are lots of other non-free
components around that are preinstalled on the device, such as the webcam
firmware.

Note that ARMv7 CrOS devices (mainly RK3288 and Tegra K1) can also boot blobless
and generally require less kernel blobs too. They also have much better upstream
Linux support than the ARMv8 ones (which are more recent). For instance, I'm
running a mainline kernel on the Tegra K1 nyans, which is quite usable despite
some issues that I have left to fix. There's also a very high chance that the
GPU will work with nouveau and free firmwares eventually (I'll be working with
nouveau developers to try and make this happen).

> The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> the USA, right?

I am not aware of it being available in Europe. However, if you're fine with a 
qwerty layout, they work just as well in Europe ;)

RK3399 can currently already boot blobless but also requires kernel blobs.
However, it seems that the boot is currently broken with coreboot master and ToT
depthcharge and vboot (I'll be investigating this soon).

Also, the Chromebook Plus (kevin) does have a free software PD firmware.

Finally, note that the Chromebook Pro is an Intel x86 device, so probably not
very interesting given what you're looking for.

Cheers,

[0]: https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware/blob/master/plat/mediatek/mt8173/drivers/spm/spm_mcdi.c

-- 
Paul Kocialkowski, developer of free digital technology and hardware support

Website: https://www.paulk.fr/
Coding blog: https://code.paulk.fr/
Git repositories: https://git.paulk.fr/ https://git.code.paulk.fr/
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