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Nonfree software found in GNU Boot releases again, many distros affected.

Item posted by GNUtoo <gnutoo> on Sat 19 Oct 2024 01:27:22 PM UTC.

The GNU Boot project previously found nonfree microcode in the first
RC1 release (in gnuboot-0.1-rc1_src.tar.xz to be exact).

This was announced in the "GNU Boot December 2023 News"
(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnuboot-announce/2023-12/msg00000.html). It
was fixed by re-making the affected tarball by hand with the nonfree
software removed and by contacting Canoeboot that had the same issue,
and by bug reporting and proposing patches to fix the issue in Guix as
well (they are still pending as we need to find a reviewer familiar
with Coreboot).

But recently we found a more problematic issue that also affects many
more distributions and all the previous GNU Boot release candidates.

The vboot source code used in Coreboot and in the vboot-utils package
available in many GNU/Linux distributions contains nonfree code in
their test data in tests/futility/data (nonfree microcode, nonfree
BIOS, nonfree Management Engine firmwares, etc).

So we had to re-release all the affected tarballs (like
gnuboot-0.1-rc1_src.tar.xz, gnuboot-0.1-rc2_src.tar.xz, etc).

We made and we improved the process along the way (we now store the
changes in tag inside our git repository and simply regenerate the
tarballs with the build system that is available for a given tag).

We are also in the process of contacting distributions and/or
coordinating with them and we also need help as there are many
distributions to contact.

To do that we started contacting the free GNU/Linux distros
(https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html) that ship the vboot
source code. We also contacted Replicant that is a free Android distro
that also ships vboot source code.

We also started to contact common distros that require certain
repositories to only have free software (so far we only contacted
Debian as that will help Trisquel fix the issue, but we also need to
contact Fedora for instance). Finding which distro to contact is made
much easier thanks to GNU's review of common distros policies
(https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html).

We coordinate that work on our bug report system at Savannah,
especially in the bug #66246
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?66246).