Star Labs Releases Coreboot 7 Open-Source Firmware for Its Linux Laptops with New Features

Coreboot 7

Star Labs announced today the release of the Coreboot 7 open-source firmware for its Linux-powered laptops with new features and improvements.

Based on the upstream Coreboot 4.14 release, Star Labs’ Coreboot 7 open-source firmware is now available for the StarBook Mk V, Star LabTop Mk III, and Star LabTop Mk IV Linux notebooks, along with an updated Coreboot Configurator utility.

This release comes about three months after Coreboot 6 and brings several new features, including a new option to set the maximum charge level as 60, 80, or 100 percent, as well as a new option to set the fan curve as Aggressive, Normal, or Quiet.

These new options are available at a glance in the Coreboot Configurator utility, which also lets you disable or enable the laptop’s wireless, webcam, microphone, Hyper-Threading, Intel VT-d, Intel ME, Fn Ctrl reverse, or clock gating options, as well as to set a power profile, keyboard backlight timeout, and Power On behavior.

Coreboot Configurator – Image courtesy of Star Labs

On top of that, the Coreboot 7 release improves the speaker volume and quality, addresses a bug that could disable the microphone, webcam and Wi-Fi when upgrading to Coreboot 6, and fixes the second ACPI backlight control.

If you own a Star LabTop Mk III, Star LapTop Mk IV or StarBook Mk V Linux laptop, and you’re using the Coreboot open-source firmware, you can update your computer to version 7 following the instructions from here.

As a reminder, you will need to have fwupd 1.5.6 or later installed on your GNU/Linux distribution, which must be Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or later, Linux Mint 20.1 or later, elementaryOS 6, or Manjaro 21 or later. Also, BIOS Lock must be disabled and your laptop should be connected to the charger and the battery charged to at least 30%.

In related news, Star Labs announced today that the recently released MX Linux 21 “Wildflower” distribution is available now as a pre-installed option for all its Linux-powered laptops, including the 11-inch StarLite Mk IV notebook that was unveiled last week.

Last updated 2 years ago

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