I'm happy to announce a working patch for the ThinkPad W520: https://review.coreboot.org/#/c/coreboot/+/23564/
Further details on this mainboard can be found on the wiki: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/w520
Kind regards, Nico Rikken
This is really great news, thank you!
Do you have any plans to support W530? I would be happy to help in any way I can. I have the W530, the flashing hardware and (I think) the debugging hardware (just need to figure out how to turn my Raspberry Pi into EHCI debug dongle).
On 02/02/2018 09:48 PM, Nico Rikken wrote:
On Tue, 2018-02-06 at 00:20 +0300, Evgeny wrote:
This is really great news, thank you!
I got some remarks on my initial patch, so I'll be expanding on that. You get a running system as it stands, but without working USB3.0 ports and the VGA-port is not working. But I intend to work out these details in the upcoming months. I've adopted it as my daily machine, so these remaining issues will nag me repeatedly :D
Perhaps in the future. For now I'm satisfied with my W520. But as the boards are pretty similar, I suggest you to first try the T530 firmware and see if you can get it working with just 2 RAM-slots. Than add the other 2 RAM-slots like I did in my patch. And than work out the remaining details like ports and stuff. If you have a firmware backup, you can always return to that point.
If I understand correctly you'd best use a Beaglebone Black or a combination or FTDI/RS232-board for EHCI-debugging. I didn't see the RaspberryPi listed anywhere. But then again, my EHCI-debugging setup (FTDI-based) is still underway, but the patch was straightforward enough to try it without that ability. So I suggest to just give it a go.
If you don't feel like making a patch, just dump the progress on the mailinglist. The previous work of Charlotte Plusplus, which didn't result in a proper patched, helped me a great deal regardless.
Kind regards, Nico Rikken
On 02/05/2018 04:20 PM, Evgeny wrote:
For the search-engineable record the W520 can support ivy bridge CPU's via coreboot in case anyone wants to know what to buy.
I suggest obtaining a USB CH341A for easier flashes, I have heard the RPI has a cumbersome flashing process (and it has shady closed source firmware)