Hello everyone.
I recently purchased a used Thinkpad X220 with Intel i7-2620M (SandyBridge) CPU, and have installed coreboot since day one. Everything seemed to work well, but since then this laptop suffered from shutting down randomly.
The random shutdown appears to be completely random, the machine just simply lost power as if someone pulls the plug, without any possible precautions. It occurs with or without battery installed, or the source of power, and determinated to be irrelevant to CPU temperature. In fact, the system is less likely to shutdown if it was performing computation-intensive tasks. It occurs on multiple versions of Linux kernel, stable and master branch of coreboot.
On my system, it also has some random hangs as described in Ticket #121 [1], but I believe it's a independent issue not related these mysterious shutting downs.
A quick search on the Internet showed many similar reported cases.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Major-X220-Motherboar... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X220-Random-Shutdown-... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/I-ve-bought-the-best-... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/x220-random-shutdown/... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X220-Random-shutdown/... https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3ex0rj/x220_random_hard_shutdown/ https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=106961
And lots of possible reasons were purposed, from bad battery, bad RAM, to bad keyboard. The most interesting suggestion was one source (Reddit) claiming a bad keyboard connection may trigger a poweroff signal and another source also stated a bended PCB under Trackpoint may short the power button cable and shut the machine down randomly. I haven't check it on my machine so far...
But it looks like most of the problems were caused by the somewhat defective motherboard. I'm going to purchase another X220 motherboard with Core i5 next week, and possiblely to pay someone to rework the board, transplating the Core i7 to the other motherboard.
Do you ever encountered a problem like this? What is your suggestion for me to try before replacing the motherboard?
Cheers, Tom Li
Tom Li via coreboot transcribed 2.4K bytes:
Hello everyone.
I recently purchased a used Thinkpad X220 with Intel i7-2620M (SandyBridge) CPU, and have installed coreboot since day one. Everything seemed to work well, but since then this laptop suffered from shutting down randomly.
The random shutdown appears to be completely random, the machine just simply lost power as if someone pulls the plug, without any possible precautions. It occurs with or without battery installed, or the source of power, and determinated to be irrelevant to CPU temperature. In fact, the system is less likely to shutdown if it was performing computation-intensive tasks. It occurs on multiple versions of Linux kernel, stable and master branch of coreboot.
On my system, it also has some random hangs as described in Ticket #121 [1], but I believe it's a independent issue not related these mysterious shutting downs.
A quick search on the Internet showed many similar reported cases.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Major-X220-Motherboar... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X220-Random-Shutdown-... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/I-ve-bought-the-best-... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/x220-random-shutdown/... https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X220-Random-shutdown/... https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3ex0rj/x220_random_hard_shutdown/ https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=106961
And lots of possible reasons were purposed, from bad battery, bad RAM, to bad keyboard. The most interesting suggestion was one source (Reddit) claiming a bad keyboard connection may trigger a poweroff signal and another source also stated a bended PCB under Trackpoint may short the power button cable and shut the machine down randomly. I haven't check it on my machine so far...
But it looks like most of the problems were caused by the somewhat defective motherboard. I'm going to purchase another X220 motherboard with Core i5 next week, and possiblely to pay someone to rework the board, transplating the Core i7 to the other motherboard.
Do you ever encountered a problem like this? What is your suggestion for me to try before replacing the motherboard?
I have a random color-glitch and eventually freezing up with a dark-screen with no debbug messages whatsoever issue with the same model. Since this can be functional for 14+ hours without any issues in between, and my configuration is somewhat lazy-unique (no binary blob for the VGA included, etc) I don't regard it as much of a problem. I just read that this (color glitch) used to happen/happens regulary with x220 coreboot.
In your case, you could try to debug your coreboot config and see if it's caused by some parts of the config.
Cheers, Tom Li
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Am Sonntag, den 29.10.2017, 23:28 +0800 schrieb Tom Li via coreboot:
Do you ever encountered a problem like this? What is your suggestion for me to try before replacing the motherboard?
Cheers, Tom Li
Just to be absolutely sure: Did you make sure the Intel ME is in place and undamaged? It is known that modern computers shut down when the ME is touched. This should happen after a certain time, though (30 min ?), and it shouldn't occur randomely like in your case.
Still, if you changed the IME I'd try reflashing an image with an untouched ME and test the machine.
P.
Do you ever encountered a problem like this? What is your suggestion for me to try before replacing the motherboard?
Just to be absolutely sure: Did you make sure the Intel ME is in place and undamaged? It is known that modern computers shut down when the ME is touched. This should happen after a certain time, though (30 min ?), and it shouldn't occur randomely like in your case.
It's definitely not the 30-minute shutdown.
Since the first day I got the machine, the ME has been stripped down using the me_cleaner script. I also set the AltMeDisable bit later on. Although these two modes don't really have a observable difference.
Still, if you changed the IME I'd try reflashing an image with an untouched ME and test the machine.
P.
I don't think Intel ME is involved doing the black magic here, but I'll probably test to run the machine with stock ME firmware when I have time.
Tom Li
In your case, you could try to debug your coreboot config and see if it's caused by some parts of the config. ng0
Unfortunately, it looks like that the random system crash and random hardware hard shutdown are two separate issues and not related. I'm still testing now...
Tom Li
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ng0 -
Philipp Stanner -
tomli＠tomli.me