Coreboot

[bobarctor]

Hi,

I'd like to install Coreboot on my Lenovo Thinkpad T520. Does anyone have experience with installing Coreboot and would be willing to give me a hand? I'd love to learn a little about this, but also don't want to break my laptop.

Thanks,

Tom

[Yvan Janssens]

Hi,

I've just took a look at http://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/t520, and it seems that you'll need to use an external flasher (see bottom of wiki page).

The easiest way to flash that machine is to use a raspberry pi - just connect some IC probes to the appropriate pins of the BIOS package and do a hardware flash. But whatever you do, make sure to dump the full BIOS chip at least three times and compare the dumps (e.g. to bios_1.dmp, bios_2.dmp, ...) and compare the hashes using e.g. shasum to make sure they're identical. This method of flashing can sometimes be slightly unreliable, especially when using low quality probes from fleabay or longer wires. Store those files away safely, since they are your fallback solution in case you need to restore the chip or it's contents.

I have flashed my X230 manually this way, so I should have all the required tools lingering around. I didn't flash coreboot though; I had to dump my EFI and patch out a check in a driver to enable my X230 to boot OS X successfully. 

I should be in the space today (but no tools on me), and tomorrow (I can bring them if you want). I will also be in the space on Monday, but I'll be working, so it'll be in the evening. After that I'll be quite busy again, but I might hop in on Sun or Mon.

Y.

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This message has been sent on the road - excuse me for my brevity.

[Jasper Wallace]

I've got a Pomona SOIC-8 clip that people have use for this in the past
(dunno if thats what you need for the T520 tho).

Let me know if you want to borrow it.

> Thanks,
> Tom
>
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[http://pointless.net/] [0x2ECA0975]

[George Cox]

I've done it on a T60p.  No real advantage in practice, but it's kind of cool if you like the thrill of thinking "have i bricked it?"

[Yvan Janssens]

... which is fairly impossible to do if you use a hardware flasher and make proper dumps first ;-)

Unless you spark the flash chip before you've got a working dump. Then you're fucked, of course, but if a thinkpad needs a hardware flasher to flash coreboot, it would also need one to flash a pirated Windows 7 SLIC or to patch out the PCI-e whitelist, so there's probably a smart arse on the internet who has uploaded his flash images publicly. The flash chips used in those thinkpads have quite large pins and can easily be replaced, and are fairly cheap to source too.

TL;DR: It's nearly impossible to brick it, even if you lose the chip.

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[Yvan Janssens]

So, I just had some small issues with my X230, mainly concerning the whitelist - I created a custom EFI firmware with the checks patched out, but I more or less failed, and I got tired of it, and decided to build coreboot+SeaBIOS+SLIC patch with the SLIC from the original EFI.

TL;DR, I've just acquired the experience and sorted out the tools to build my own coreboot image and flash it.

My agenda is currently quite volatile, I might be in next week, quite likely on Tuesday.

Y.

On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 3:54 PM 'bobarctor' via London Hackspace <london-h...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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