Libreboot 26.01rc1 “Tenacious Tomato” released!

The codename for this release series is Tenacious Tomato. Today’s release is a beta/RC. You can find it here: https://rsync.libreboot.org/testing/26.01rc1/ Or you can find it on a mirror.

This is the first RC release in the Libreboot 26.01 release series. It is expected that a new RC will be issued weekly between now and the end of January 2026; the final in January 2026 will become the full Libreboot 26.01 release.

Binaries are available to download from Libreboot RSYNC and HTTP mirrors.

Testing very much welcome. Please test this release on your board and contact Libreboot if you encounter problems. It is expected that all boards will be stable, but as this is an RC release, you should expect bugs. Nearly all of the code revisions have been updated, for instance GRUB and coreboot.

Libreboot 26.01 RC1 release change log is simply a Git log, relative to the Libreboot 25.06 release; a proper release page will be written for the full 26.01 release, which will be ready in the final days of January 2026.

But here are some brief mentions of changes, before going into the full git logs:

Several new mainboards have been added, such as:

Topton X2E N150

Lenovo ThinkPad T580

HP Pro 3500 Series

Numerous build system improvements were made, making the build process more deterministic. Several safety improvements, e.g. reduced use of eval, better hashing of project files (especially checking vendor file extraction).

Several bug fixes, e.g. ThunderBolt supported added to the ThinkPad T480, headphone jack auto-detection on T480 also. (ditto T480s)

A lot more new work will be done between now and the end of January 2026. It is very much the case that Libreboot 26.01 is an ongoing project. Therefore, this first RC release can be considered a snapshot of that progress. It was always the case that a December 25th release was planned, but this was originally going to be a full Libreboot 25.12 release - now it will be Libreboot 26.01.

Work is ongoing to integrate Google Chromebooks, by integrating the MrChromebox distribution of coreboot into Libreboot’s build system.

Improved safety when handling vendor file downloads. For example, the sbase implementation of sha512sum is now provided by lbmk and compiled by it, rather than relying on the host’s sha512sum implementation. This ensures more consistent functionality, for such a critical tool (lbmk uses sha512sum to hash everything). This is also used when checking project files, to see when a project changed and has to be recompiled.

Minor features added, such as CBFS-based backend courtesy Nicholas Chin, for boards where NVRAM is not used; ThinkPad T480 for example.

I had other stuff going on in my personal life so didn’t do much Libreboot development, between October 2025 to November 2025. This is why the release has been pushed back to January 2026 instead of December 2025.

When life throws you lemons, make tomatoes.