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The Timed LLVM Compilation test is taking forever on the my old ThinkPad...

But I checked, and it's using all 12 cores (as shown by the CPU monitor widget on my desktop). #benchmarks

While waiting for the benchmark results, I'll build coreboot and the Open EC firmware for my new baby

The #System76 firmware build process is fully automated, and a real pleasure to watch

Hats off to the #System76 engineers who delivered this slick developer experience:
https://github.com/system76/firmware-open
#coreboot #openhardware

And, it's done! Now let's hope this easy peasy firmware flash procedure doesn't brick my new Lemur Pro...
https://photos.app.goo.gl/NPn3mWBWjWsnrETj7
#system76 #coreboot

The #System76 setup menu is somewhat minimalistic, but there's a version, and that's enough to confirm that it's indeed running my scratch build from git head.

I guess I won't have to learn any recovery procedures today

Ok, time to open up the case!
#System76 #RightToRepair

Let's take a good look at the insides of the new #System76 lemp11

As @10leej already noted, the speakers are the only disappointment with the Lemur Pro.

My ThinkPad X1 speakers weren't great, but these are truly dreadful

I mostly use my laptop with headphones, but I wonder if they could be upgraded with better ones? I'd definitely give #System76 a few extra bucks for mid-range speakers.

And this must be the SPI flash which now holds *MY* coreboot firmware. #System76

My lemp11 is nicely documented along with all other #System76 motherboards:
https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/lemp11/internal-overview.html

There are also instructions to replace or upgrade various parts:
https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/lemp10/repairs.html

Now, if only #System76 offered a better pair of speakers...

Final step: I move the NVMe drive to the new laptop and power up. As expected, Fedora 36 immediately boots.

Actually, I got a glimpse of a blue screen during POST, but it disappeared before I could read it.

My #KDE #Plasma desktop works flawlessly on this new hardware

Migrating to the Lemur Pro could have been a 15-minutes operation to swap the hard drive. It took me 2 days to give #System76 some well deserved coverage.

So I'm giving 5 monkeys to the
new Lemur Pro, would purchase again:

#System76 does no evil, except when it comes to speak...ers.

And I'm giving #PopOS 5 penguins:

I would recommend it to present #Ubuntu users who'd rather not be forced into using #Snap.

#System76 hardware is not required. My old ThinkPad booted from the drive that came with the Lemur Pro, and everything works normally:

And I'm giving 5 flashes to #System76's firmware:

I feel an important milestone has been achieved: a modern laptop running #Coreboot and #OpenEC firmware out of the box.

Some of you might be thinking that #System76 laptops are still not 100% free from proprietary blobs. And that's true. But please, appreciate how huge of a leap this is.

I wished to see this happen for over a decade. In 2014, it was barely possible for a highly motivated geek to flash Coreboot on a 2-years old ThinkPad:
https://codewiz.org/wiki/CorebootX230

There were very few engineers on the planet with the required knowledge and skills to port #Coreboot to an Alder Lake motherboard, and even fewer who are employed by a PC vendor like #System76 who *wants* to achieve this!

Google shipped #Coreboot on millions of Chromebooks, bot those were low-end machines with smartphone-grade SoCs and not enough flash on board to be a proper developer's laptop.

I mean, kudos to Google for liberating an entire market segment from vendor-locked proprietary BIOSes. It's just not the kind of machine I need every day.

Meanwhile, my benchmark results are ready to analyze:
https://tinyurl.com/lemp11-vs-x1g7

It's a compute benchmark between 3 Linux machines:

#System76 lemp11
Lemur Pro i7-1255U
Pop!_OS 22.04

Giskard, my old laptop
Thinkpad X1G7 i7-10710U
Fedora 36

Goreboot, a mid-end desktop
MSI Z690-A DDR5 i7-12700F
Radeon RX Vega 64
Arch Linux, btw

Unsurprisingly, the desktop outperformed both my lightweight laptops by a good measure.

If you have to compile C++ code, do it on a desktop with lots of fast cores. Keep in mind that modern Intel CPUs come with two kinds of cores: P (performance) and E (efficient, but slower).

My #System76 Lemur Pro has 10 cores, but only two of them are P

The older Thinkpad X1 had a 10th generation Intel CPU with 6 cores (12 threads), but they're evidently much slower, at least when compiling LLVM.

@codewiz how is it decided for what task takes the P core?

@Maryam The kernel decides based on various heuristics (owner, nice, past cpu usage of the entire process tree, active power profile...)

Hopefully, it won't use the P cores at all when running on battery. @Maryam