[ltp] Re: [Thinkpad] Free T60

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

[CC coreboot@coreboot.org]

Am 01.07.2012 16:45 schrieb Henrique de Moraes Holschuh:
> On Mon, 25 Jun 2012, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>> You do know that all Thinkpad T60/X60 can replace the BIOS with coreboot?
> How would that work?  About half the stuff the firmware does is an
> interaction between the EC and the SMBIOS, did anyone reverse engineer
> that?

Actually, yes. You can achieve quite a lot if you have IDA Pro and a few
high-end logic analyzers at hand.


> Or are you guys just running the EC in whatever state it cold-starts at?
> You can probably get away with it for a while on a T60/X60, but...
>
> Well, at least make sure to have thinkpad-acpi and use something to
> monitor the kernel log, so that if the EC starts alarming that the
> machine is going to catch fire, thinkpad-acpi will LOG_ALERT and
> LOG_CRIT to the kernel log, and something will tell you to DO SOMETHING
> ASAP.  Gnome thinks it knows better, and *actively* refuses[1] to output
> even the two "your box is about to do something REALLY bad" highest
> priority log levels.  KDE is not that irresponsible and will alert you.
>
> [1] as in: it was done on purpose, because "users don't know what to do
> with those messages anyway".

The information about assisted machine suicide on GNOME is actually
quite interesting, I don't know how this is handled on a machine running
coreboot.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel