Road to FSF endorsement… and Beyond

Purism carries on with its ambitious plans to be the first manufacturer of brand new laptops to ever receive the Free Software Foundation‘s Respects Your Freedoms (“RYF”) certification.

Since the question “Why doesn’t Purism already have the FSF’s RYF certification?” comes up regularly, we wanted to provide a visual roadmap for our progress as we work toward FSF endorsement of PureOS and FSF RYF certification of our hardware.

Footnotes regarding items in red:

• We are beginning the process to get FSF Distribution Endorsement (not to be confused with FSF “RYF” hardware endorsement) for PureOS. We are hoping to get official distribution endorsement for PureOS 3.
• Purism is replacing the proprietary BIOS by coreboot in its Librem laptops.
• Purism has tested and demonstrated the neutralizing of the Management Engine itself, will be enforcing this into its coreboot-enabled laptops, and is continuing towards neutralizing or freeing the remaining parts.
• Purism is considering shipping only NVRAM drives.

Status updates

Purism offers the first high-end privacy and freedom-respecting laptops by manufacturing the motherboard and casing, and sourcing daughter cards, where all chips are designed to run free software. Purism laptops are completely free from the BIOS (see the history of our coreboot involvement) to the bootloader through the kernel (with no mystery code, binary blobs, or firmware blobs), including the operating system and all software. We have yet to free the Intel FSP binary and we have neutralized the ME binary from within the coreboot BIOS to move us toward FSF RYF endorsement. We are working diligently to free the (minuscule) remaining bits, but our goal is to go further than that: Purism also intends to free the firmware within HDDs and SSDs.

Refer to the following posts to see our efforts, discoveries and progress toward freeing the components needed to free the BIOS completely. From newest to oldest (list last updated: 2017-10-17):

• Deep Dive into Intel ME Disablement
• Coreboot on the Librem 13 v2, part 2
• Coreboot on the Librem 13 v2, part 1
• Reverse-engineering the Intel Management Engine’s ROMP module
• Preventing AMI’s BIOS from interfering with coreboot flashing
• Trammell Hudson and Purism join forces to set a new standard for security-focused laptops
• Neutralizing the Intel Management Engine on Librem Laptops
• The Librem 13 v1 coreboot port is now complete
• Librem 13 coreboot report – February 3rd, 2017: It’s Alive!
• Librem 13 coreboot report – January 12, 2017
• Diving back into coreboot development
• Intel ME-less petition goal met early
• BIOS progress update: 2015-08-21
• BIOS progress update: 2015-08-14
• Roadmap to a Completely Free BIOS
• About Purism and Librems and Cake
• Freeing the BIOS: Memory Init
• Pioneering CPU Efforts to Liberate Laptop Hardware
• BIOS Freedom Status as of November 2014

We will update this page as we progress toward FSF RYF endorsement and beyond. See also the many other pages in our “Why Purism?” section, including our coreboot page.

If you are a talented hacker, driver developer or reverse engineer, and are interested in helping us free the remaining low-level hardware components, please send us an email about that.

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Updated: April 19th, 2017