Sorry for the long wait - I was quite busy.
If it's so, then the HT patch is not to
blame... But we'll see after your tests.
I hope I never claimed / implied that! If anything reducing the
amount of threads (either through the patch or the nosmt kernel
parameter) did improve stability when running Debian.
Onto the tests - I'm rather confused on how to interpret the
results.
As stated before, I would test multiple setups with blobs (ifd, me,
gbe) based on the Lenovo BIOS v2.81. I have omitted the vgabios
test.
1. fully blob'ed with the me intact (CBFS size 0x700000)
2. fully blob'ed with the me shrinked (CBFS size 0xBE5000)
I tested on two different Linux distributions.
(I build and flashed coreboot using a Raspberry Pi at a older master
than the master used for testing)
Debian Buster 10.2, Kernel 4.19.0, "old master"
> I couldn't build the crossgcc-i386 with multiple threads or
watch YT videos using Firefox. I eventually was fed up and decided
to install Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon to make sure I didn't mess up
something on my Debian install.
Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon, Kernel 5.3.0, master @
1ab6f0c176c1aa6947bf0d3fbe0a213f316e9c67
> I could build the crossgcc-i386 with multiple threads without
issues. I could also watch Youtube videos using Firefox but at some
point the system would become more or less randomly unstable or
Cinnamon would crash / freeze. Namely when I watched videos in full
screen mode. CPU temps seemed fine though. To rule out Cinnamon as
an issue, I installed Linux Mint 19.3 XFCE.
Linux Mint 19.3 XFCE, Kernel 5.0.0, master @
1ab6f0c176c1aa6947bf0d3fbe0a213f316e9c67
> The first build of the crossgcc-i386 with multiple threads did
produce some issues / the build could not be continued due to an
error. After a crossgcc-clean the build completed just fine. I also
got freezes when watching YT videos on Firefox namely in full screen
mode.
I have attached my .config and a script + systemd unit which I use
to reduce power draw of my T430 (all settings were suggested by
powertop, aside from deactivating turbo boost).
---
I'm wondering if this is really an issue with coreboot / my Linux
distro or rather hardware related ... I'm considering to throw
memtest86+ [1] at the RAM and see if the RAM is working properly.
Regards
lhochstetter
[1]
https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2018-November/087713.html