You have a point there. I am not sure about cash, though my knowledge of startups is much lesser compared to listed companies. I remember VCs pulling out funds during economic slowdowns and stuff and my POV was this was being prudent financially. And the sum of the partnership would result in a bigger value as a whole.
I am frankly not familiar with how BIOSes are made and maintained. I was looking at motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS/MSI/EVGA, the teams doesn’t look small. ^^"
one of my companies was struggling when covid hit so I know the topic, but in my opinion Framework has great support from investors also CEO is experienced guy in the financing field 
IMO partnership would result in bigger value it would influence sales or produce some “outstanding product” - but i think “just another” Chromebook is not much revenue-generating product in the “open-laptop” segment also not much innovation comes out of this.
traditional bioses(uefi) like Aptio and others are really “heavy cows” and that’s why they need alot of specialists - they’re basically small OS’es
coreboot on other hand is smaller project and also adopting it to specific platform usually needs not much more than 3-4 embedded developers to make it “professional way” oftentimes there are even motivated individuals which port coreboot to machine by themselves with great success (oftentimes without any documentation on platform :D)
Just being curious, assuming the hardware is capable, would coreboot achieve like a full feature set similar to how ASUS/MSI gaming laptops are? XMP, overclocking etc. The only memories I have of coreboot was the ones really long time ago, the newer ones I have only see like screenshots on the web.
yes, it depends on integration level and how well ported the coreboot is, but if it’s fully ported it gives even more options than usual uefi/bios - but the configuration is much more less “user fool proof” - if you use some wrong values you can burn your laptop/pc you can easily compare the experience like that:
consider that traditional uefi/bios is like windows. it works, gives alot of options and usually doesnt give you a chance to shoot yourself in the foot 
Coreboot on the other hand is like early linux - you can burn your pc and entire neighbourhood if you tweak it too much XD
but also coreboot can be provided with easy setup gui - it depends on how much work has been done on specific “port”
@intptr thank you for advertising 3mdeb. I’m watching all Framework threads related to firmware for some time. We are always open for collaboration even if vendor for some reason cannot commit to the effort.
What I can say is that I’m pretty sure Framework is well aware of commercial parties on the open-source firmware market and did required due diligence.
We already enabled bunch of Clevo laptops with 11th Gen. Soon we will announce next generation. We also did workstations and firewalls. Our most recent achievements were with MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 and Alder Lake, now we preparing Raptor Lake enabling. All this as part of Dasharo open-source firmware distribution.
If there is anything we can help please let us know.
Yeah, could you ballpark how much we’d have to crowd fund to get 3mdeb to port cortboot to the framework laptop(s) without Framework’s cooperation? Maybe we could do this ourselves.
I think on some level it’ll always require some cooperation with Framework. They have access to design schematics and the like necessary to properly get coreboot working on it, so even if we funded it, they’d need to work with whoever is writing it if we want it done in a timely fashion.
Sure, but biggest problem is that units are shipped with Intel Boot Guard enabled.
Also it is important to realize what features are really needed. Please note that we doing releases only under Dasharo open-source firmware distribution for which we would like to meet some quality criteria. Of course Dasharo consist of coreboot and EDKII code, which we try to upstream.
If one is interested in just-a-hack and cheapest possible solution it can be probably done <15k USD, but that path should be done by some individual or maybe other open-source firmware vendors from coreboot consulting list. We cannot afford such approach since we realized this just creating huge technical debt and unhappy users in long run. So if one can approach this project with <15k USD budget we would pass.
OTOH if we would do release it will contain certain quality criteria like those mentioned in linked Dasharo Certification Program, so in long run we could provide further improvements and support. You can check how our releases look like for some platforms:
Please note test results linked on release pages MSI and NovaCustom.
Based on that fact price would be probably 2-3x of mentioned limit depending on selected feature set.
Is the Coreboot firmware on the Framework Chromebook the same as the Coreboot that comes on other non-Chromebook laptops, or is it somehow specific to Google/ChromeOS?
If I can buy a Framework Chromebook motherboard and install any Linux distro I want on it that would be pretty cool, but if the firmware is somehow specific to Google/ChromeOS and not out of the box compatible with other Linux distros it wouldn’t be as useful for me.
I would really like to have a laptop with an open source OS and Firmware. My last laptop had a proprietary OS/Firmware. After using it happily for several years the vendor stopped releasing new OS/Firmware updates for the hardware. Even though I would still like to use the machine it’s now pretty difficult due to the out of date proprietary OS. Application software I want to use is no longer compatible with the older OS on the laptop, and I fear what unpatched security issues it might have.
If it helps I would contribute $ to open source firmware/coreboot on Framework laptops.
I also had this idea, and would love to know the answer. I’d really like to buy a framework laptop, but I won’t buy without coreboot.
I did some more online research after posting my question. Assuming the Framework Chromebook is like all other Chromebooks, the build of core boot that comes out of the box on the Chromebook boots only ChromeOS and nothing else.
If you’re willing to do the extra work of re-flashing the device with an upstream/community build of core boot then yes regular Linux distros can be installed on it. It will take some time for the community to produce the builds and workout any bugs.
The best community resource for reflashing I found was: https://mrchromebox.tech/
Separately Framework seems to be working on more generalized support for coreboot on non-Chromebook laptops if you’re willing to wait. On the Hacker News thread for the Framework Chromebook announcement someone asked: “…does this mean it’ll be possible to create a Coreboot edition of the original Framework motherboard design…”
NRP’s response: “…This is something we’ll be putting more energy into next year as we grow the Framework team.”
That’s one of the thing I am hoping that comes out of this partnership with Google. Can’t wait for the new speakers too.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for him. No disrespect intended but he is an employee of Purism so I imagine they keep him quite busy. It does look like he takes requests for porting Coreboot. He even has an email for commercial entities wanting Coreboot. If there is sufficient user interest and more importantly, money, I imagine the community here could pay him to convert the existing Corebooted Chromebook and make it possible to boot Linux.
That’s a good point. I don’t mean to imply he would do the work to build a coreboot image from upstream for the Framework Chromebook. Having no prior knowledge about Chromebook flashing I found a lot of helpful info about the general process on his page.
@Piotr_Krol It looks like he left! Guess it’s not a surprise. Since he is still working as an independent dev, I suppose he could be contracted by Purism on a case by case basis.
Sure, if new position leave enough room for that. Anyway we can always ask him, he is very responsive person on IRC, Matrix, Github etc.
Coreboot and Intel ME are the only things stopping me from completely ditching System76 for Framework. I hope this is worked out before I have to upgrade. The quality looks much better than current Clevos and I doubt the System76 in-house design will be this good even if it is ever brought to market.
I think this is a bit much but when coreboot is implemented, can we get the appearance and UI of something at least like Intel’s Visual BIOS?
I was looking at a Intel NUC (12th gen mobile processor) recently and wow, it looks really good with many features.
Considering Framework are using Intel CPUs, if my memory serves, Intel BIOS allows for various adjustments similar to when Intel made motherboards years ago.
If we can set these somehow, Im happy. a gui could be a payload maybe? I really hope the coreboot image that we someday hopefully get allow us to load our own payloads (as I asume it needs to be signed by FW to be accepted by the bootguard.)