Motiejus Jakštys wrote:
indeed it worked! Computer is now booted from SeaBios. :)
Great! Please make sure to also follow the remaining steps, in particular to re-set BUC.TS back to 0, and it's also good to flash a new coreboot.rom.
An unpatched flashrom should succeed without any errors when the machine runs coreboot.
Instead of:
then run dd if=coreboot.rom bs=1 \ skip=$[sizeof(coreboot.rom) - 0x10000] count=64k | hexdump
Should be: then run dd if=coreboot.rom bs=1 \ skip=$[sizeof(coreboot.rom) - 0x20000] count=64k | hexdump
Ah yes to verify that the copying was successful. Thank you!
However, there are two caveats:
- major one. There is silent squeeking which is heard from the fan
slot. It gives me head pain after seconds. The only way to stop it seems to be to give processor some activity (when I start programs, use dd or cpuburn it stops. Immediately when activity finishes the sound is heard once again).
I blame this on poor quality of the power supply electronics in the laptop.
When the processor switches between different performance states the power supply generates an audible noise.
Because the CPU switches very frequently between different performance states the audible noise is heard constantly, except when the CPU remains fully used.
The workaround I use is to add idle=halt to the kernel command line. This means that power consumption is higher than otherwise, but to me it is most important that the machine is silent.
I have a 2.0 GHz CPU, but I must limit this to 996 MHz in order to not have the machine overheat during use. This is the same for me regardless of which firmware is used, happens both with factory BIOS and coreboot+SeaBIOS.
In my start scripts I have:
cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq && { echo userspace > scaling_governor echo 996000 > scaling_max_freq }
This of course helps compensate for the shorter battery runtime with idle=halt.
Now, there is also a possibility that coreboot can do something to work around this situation, similarly to what the factory BIOS obviously does, since the noise is not present there, but this has not been researched.
I have experienced the same issue with factory BIOS on an X40, when the machine was old. This confirms that the components used in the power supply have worn out.
- booting Linux from USB stick takes for ever. (loading kernel and
initrd takes >10 minutes). However, USB performance is fine when booted from hard drive.
This is a SeaBIOS issue. Recommend to post about this on the SeaBIOS mailing list.
I'm glad to hear that it works for you!
//Peter