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IIRC, there was a non-publicly-known switch to turn off IME, for government purposes, which became publicly-known. There have also been efforts to delete just
by neilv 3y ago
IIRC, there was a non-publicly-known switch to turn off IME, for government purposes, which became publicly-known. There have also been efforts to delete just part of IME from the flash. A couple links:
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner
https://doc.coreboot.org/northbridge/intel/sandybridge/me_cleaner.html https://doc.coreboot.org/northbridge/intel/sandybridge/me_cl...
On X200-era systems, however, you can remove IME entirely from the flash, which is what I did. I put only Coreboot and GRUB2 on the flash, but you can add SeaBIOS to that, if you want more PC BIOS facilities and options available.
(So I stockpiled a few backup units of the X200, before they disappeared from the market, or the available units got too beaten up or expensive.)
- vel0city 3y agoI seen to recall having some Thinkpads which had a firmware setting that would irrecoverably break the management engine. It had a lot of scary warnings about disabling it, and likewise features like SGX wouldn't work properly from what I could tell. I think they were T460S'es, but I could be misremembering.
- divingdragon 3y agoThere is an official way to completely disable and remove Computrace (which I did on my T480), but I don't remember anything that allowed removing ME.