# Alternative BIOSes



## balanga (Mar 28, 2018)

Does anyone have any views/experiences on using alternative BIOSes such as Libreboot or CoreBoot especially on ThinkPads?


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## Crivens (Mar 28, 2018)

I have an old T60 here I would love to try it out with.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Mar 28, 2018)

The people at thinkpad.com forums are who I'd ask. There are 177 results for Libreboot, 269 for CoreBoot and they know Thinkpads.

Glossing over it, it looks like some models are more suited for it than others.


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## vermaden (Mar 28, 2018)

How is FreeBSD support for Libreboot or Coreboot 'open' BIOSes?


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## SirDice (Mar 28, 2018)

As far as I know FreeBSD doesn't use anything from the BIOS. The BIOS is really only there to initialize the hardware and boot the machine. If that works FreeBSD should have no problems with it.


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## Sensucht94 (Mar 28, 2018)

vermaden said:


> How is FreeBSD support for Libreboot or Coreboot 'open' BIOSe



From official www.coreboot.org:



> FreeBSD should work out of the box with SeaBIOS. In case of problems, please tell us through the Mailinglist Alternatively you can boot FreeBSD using GRUB2 as payload.



Another proof comes from FreeBSD comfortably booting on QEMU, which uses coreboot+SeaBios by default.

Personally, I've installed FreeBSD on a friend's Chromebook, with Coreboot+SeaBios, replacing the stock Chrome's proprietary payload. In this regard, an interesting page to look up is Chromebook FreeBSD.

FreeBSD should also have no problem booting on TianoCore as well; however, I still have to test it. Meanwhile, give a look at
freebsd/uefi-edk2 on github

Regarding LibreBoot, I do not know much about it,but this message on freebsd-current mailing list is disheartening

However, this official tutorial states the contrary: libreboot should be viable on FreeBSD, as it seems LibreBoot supports GRUB2 or depthcharge (Chromebooks proprietary payload) as payloads. This also implies that FreeBSD should boot on depthcharge either, without having to wipe the stock firmware out


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## vermaden (Mar 28, 2018)

Thank you for replies.


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