8 ms·
I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
- brcmthrowaway 8mo agoWas AI Used?
- amiga-workbench 8mo agoI wonder if this can help with the extremely irritating bug (intentional?) on the X270 where if you give it a third party 9-cell battery, it will raise CPU_PROCHOT all the damn time, and my processor would drop to below 1Ghz clock speeds. Back when I used to have an X270 I had a shell script that ran on boot which poked a register to disable thermal throttling handling. Not at all ideal, but it made the machine usable in the absence of official Lenovo batteries which they stopped manufacturing pretty damn quickly.
- nxobject 8mo agoDo you think it could also be due to an ACPI table?
- amiga-workbench 8mo agoIts possible. I know from the BIOS revision changelogs that the T470 did get a patch to fix this, but the X270 never did.
- p_l 8mo agoNot sure if battery issue is fully related but... As a former owner of a T470, Lenovo included a pretty beefy component from intel that was supposed to be feature complete by itself for dynamically managing thermals, including funky ideas like detecting if you were potentially using the laptop on your legs etc. and reducing thermals then, but giving full power when running plugged on the desk. Time comes for delivery, Lenovo finds out that intel did a half-assed job (not the first time, compare Rapid Start "hibernation" driver earlier) and the result is kabylake T470 (and X270 which share most of the design) having broken thermals when running anything other than windows without special intel driver, thus leading to funny tools that run in a loop picking at an MSR in the CPU in a constant whack-a-mole with piece of code deep in firmware.
- 65a 8mo agoPossibly. Usually this is handled by the embedded controller, and not sure if that was reversed or not. You may be able to tristate the GPIO line that tells the CPU that a pin means PROCHOT, which would allow you to ignore the ECs attempts to do this.
- mattv8 8mo ago[flagged]
- notpushkin 8mo agoSeek and thou shalt find. Just don’t be too pushy on the romantic side of things.
- mattv8 8mo agoToo late for me then I suppose, I'm married with two kids.
- esseph 8mo agoThis gave me a good chuckle :)
- mattv8 8mo agoI'm glad you saw it as humor- thats how it was intended. I love my wife dearly but we spend our free time very differently. I'm an engineer, she's an epidemiologist. I'm more creative and like to build things, she's more interested in watching the news. We do have great conversations about cosmology and physics though.
- periodjet 8mo agoThis is absurdly trans-coded. Ah, todsacerdoti. ;)
- katdork 8mo agoI am a trans woman, yes :o (the user who posted my blog post is not me :p)
- reductum 8mo agoAtom feed is malformed :(
- BobbyTables2 8mo agoHow did OP debug this without a serial port? I’ve messed around with porting coreboot on two desktop platforms but always had the benefit of a HW serial port…
- 65a 8mo agoYou can sometimes find the serial lines if you are careful. Otherwise you can use the flashrom to store the output, and read it back out after each failure. It is much easier to just poke around and find the serial if you can, either from schematics (it seems the author has these) or by hand with a lot of patience or board scrying.
- katdork 8mo agobecause the x280 and x270 are similar enough I didn't need to try very hard to get it to post or boot a live USB to further investigate (effectively acting as a decent template for me to work off of) The console viewing itself was provided by `cbmem -1`, which I could run via a NixOS live USB with nixpkgs#coreboot-utils
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- warangal 8mo agopretty cool work! Though it leaves me wondering if coreboot/bios code can directly interface with thermal-management and battery controller , shouldn't it be feasible to improve upon battery life by exposing some interface to OS, like apple laptops ?
- merpkz 8mo ago> I can’t recommend libreboot enough, or even heads if libreboot isn’t your speed. Why though? Not a single reason mentioned in post about why would it be better than whatever stock BIOS the laptop is shipped with.
- hypfer 8mo agoThe goal of that blog post is not to sell you something. This can be confusing on HN, I know.
- normie3000 8mo agoA recommendation without context is pointless. A recommendation with context could be very helpful!
- hypfer 8mo ago[flagged]
- cromka 8mo ago[flagged]
- maxerickson 8mo agoBurma Shave.
- miscellanemone 8mo agoYou've unlocked a hilarious memory of driving through southern California and seeing all these signs as a kind of one-word-at-a-time advertisement back in the 90s. Someone had to have recreated them as some kind of joke because all the original signs had been gone for decades.
- alias_neo 8mo agoIt replaces a proprietary component of your system with an open source one. Reading https://libreboot.org/#why-use-libreboot https://libreboot.org/#why-use-libreboot might provide further enlightenment.
- znpy 8mo agoI always wondered, what is the practical advantage of running coreboot on my laptop?
- octoclaw 8mo agoThe PROCHOT discussion in this thread is a good example. Lenovo stops making batteries, third party ones trigger artificial throttling, and the only fix is poking registers with a boot script. With coreboot you can just... fix it properly. More broadly: faster boot times (sub-second POST is common), no vendor bloat or hidden phone-home behavior in the firmware, and you can actually audit what runs before your OS loads. That last one matters more than people think. Your BIOS has full access to everything on the machine before any OS-level security even starts.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoReally cool! I wish that Coreboot was available for more recent Thinkpads. I have a Z13 Gen2 which I plan to use until it falls apart, and would love to liberate it with Coreboot. But alas, I can't.
- hypercube33 8mo agoHow's your experience with that? It's on the top of my dream laptop list but it's expensive and the second gen is more so....looks like they killed off the line right before it got to the sweet spot (ryzen ai max line) just like the surface laptop which makes me sad. There were a lot of reports about those things having power or heat firmware problems?
- paulhart 8mo agoI have one for work; I was excited to receive it, I’ve never been more disappointed with a laptop bearing the ThinkPad brand. Lots of intermittent issues with graphics, BT audio, and performance.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoIt's the best laptop I have ever used. I have it since it newly came out in 2023 and it never let me down, is quick (I have the 7840u), quiet (passive in power-saver platform profile, unless pushed, but even then it's manageable), can do USB4 so I can use it with a EGPU, which works fantastically. Sleep (S0) works as expected with updated EC FW under Debian stable. It's incredibly portable, when you take it out of the box you wonder if it's not too small (it's not, it's a perfect size :)). Battery endurance is good, at least for me. You won't make 10h flights while compiling Chromium though. Get the LCD instead of the OLED if you can, the OLED looks good but uses way more battery I hear. If you can find it in the max config (64GB, 7840u, 2TB) it's going to make you happy for a long, long time I think. I don't know what I will use after it dies. There's nothing comparable in portability, power and build quality (which is really, really amazing). I agree with you: this thing, a few mm thicker and heavier due to beefier heatsink, with a Ryzen 395+ and 128GB would be so incredible. I'd dump so much money into that...
- umairnadeem123 8mo ago[dead]
- nticompass 8mo agoI installed Coreboot/Tianocore on my T430 and it was awesome! Mostly, it got rid of Lenovo's stupid WiFi whitelist. A few years ago, I got an X270 since my T430 was feeling sluggish. I'd be curious to try this! My X270 has a 7th-gen core i5, is that Kaby Lake? Does coreboot/libreboot on the X270 need SeaBIOS or will it work with Tianocore?