Libreboot 20241206, 10th revision released! GRUB security fixes, better LVM scanning, non-root USB2 hub support

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Article published by: Leah Rowe

Date of publication: 18 February 2025

Today’s Libreboot 20241206 revision is the 10th revision in the Libreboot 20241206 stable release series. The changelog on this page is written, relative to Libreboot 20241206 revision 9 which was released on 12 February 2025. The original Libreboot 20241206 release came out on 6 December 2024. You can find the full list of revisions here and the original release here.

Libreboot is a free/open source BIOS/UEFI replacement on x86 and ARM, providing boot firmware that initialises the hardware in your computer, to then load an operating system (e.g. Linux/BSD). It is specifically a coreboot distribution, in the same way that Debian is a Linux distribution. It provides an automated build system to produce coreboot ROM images with a variety of payloads such as GRUB or SeaBIOS, with regular well-tested releases to make coreboot as easy to use as possible for non-technical users. From a project management perspective, this works in exactly the same way as a Linux distro, providing a source-based package manager (called lbmk) which patches sources and compiles coreboot images. It makes use of coreboot for hardware initialisation, and then a payload such as SeaBIOS or GRUB to boot your operating system; on ARM(chromebooks), we provide U-Boot (as a coreboot payload).

We also provide an experimental U-Boot setup on x86, as a coreboot payload for providing a minimal UEFI implementation.

Normally, revisions would only be documented on the Libreboot 20241206 revisions page, but this revision contains critical security fixes, so it was decided that there should be a full announcement, to ensure that more people see it.

GRUB released 73 patches to its main branch, fixing a large number of security issues. You can read about them here:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2025-02/msg00024.html

This updates GRUB to revision 4dc6166571645780c459dde2cdc1b001a5ec844c from 18 February 2025. Several OOB heap writes, buffer overflows, use after frees and so on, are now prevented with this update.

In addition to the security fixes, several out-of-tree fixes from Libreboot’s main branch have been merged for GRUB, fixing bugs in the xHCI driver, and adding support for non-root USB2 hubs on platforms that use the xhci GRUB tree.

Changes to the GRUB configuration have been made, to make scanning of LVM volume/group names more reliable, including on full-disk-encryption setups. More such changes are planned for the next major release; the current changes are very minor.

Markdown file for this page: https://libreboot.org/news/libreboot20241206rev10.md

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