Author Topic: Sources of Plop Boot Manager 5.0.15+ plpbt as a part of coreboot opensource BIOS  (Read 5581 times)

mikeb

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Good day, Elmar! I've just tested your Plop Boot Manager 5.0.15 as a part of coreboot+SeaBIOS opensource BIOS
by adding your plpbt.img floppy to my fresh coreboot.rom build with the following command:
Code: [Select]
./coreboot/build/cbfstool ./coreboot/build/coreboot.rom add -f ~/Downloads/plpbt.img -n floppyimg/plpbt.lzma -t raw -c lzma
I am happy to tell you that Plop Boot Manager seems to be working great - at least successfully boots Linux from USB flash drive! :)

However, I am really concerned by that Plop Boot Manager source code is not open:
it could be hard to justify keeping a closed source proprietary software as a part of opensource BIOS
for security considerations: theoretically any closed source software could contain the backdoors,
and having it as a part of BIOS is a permanent security risk that I would like to avoid if possible.

Elmar, please could you release the source code of Plop Boot Manager?

Also I've just learned that you are going to release a new Boot Manager soon.
Don't know if it would be open source, but it would be really nice if you could
at least liberate the source code of plpbt-5.0.15 which came out almost 6 years ago

P.S. if you became curious about this opensource bios, please visit the coreboot board status page, to check
if your motherboard is supported , or maybe you could get one? personally I am using AMD Lenovo G505S laptop :
it has a powerful quadcore A10-5750M CPU without AMD PSP hardware backdoor (an equivalent of Intel ME backdoor),
supports 16GB of RAM and could be found in good condition for just $100-$150. Great choice for security conscious people

Best regards,
Mike Banon,
opensource firmware enthusiast
« Last Edit: January 27, 2019, 14:18:06 PM by mikeb »

mikeb

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Quote from: Elmar
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dear Elmar, please could you reply to a message above?

Elmar

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Hello Mike,

to make it short, at the moment, its not planed to release the old boot manager source code.

Best regards
Elmar