[coreboot] Trouble with T60p (whine and trackpoint dead)

[Peter Stuge]

Hi,

David Griffith wrote:
> > The first flash was successful, as you are clearly using coreboot. :)
> >
> > It's important that you flash again. Now that you have coreboot just
> > run flashrom to write the coreboot.rom. Set the BUC.TS bit
> > appropriately, otherwise your machine will not boot anymore
> > after NVRAM battery outage.
> 
> I did the flash again and the result after rebooting is a long beep 
> followed by two short beeps.

So you flashed but did not set BUC.TS appropriately.


> According to what I find with Google, the laptop is bricked and I
> need to open it up to get at the boot flash chip and flash it with
> a bus pirate.

You can try removing power and NVRAM battery from the board first.

Leave the board completely unpowered, no charger, no main battery and
no NVRAM battery, for half a minute or so. Then connect everything
again.

It might work, but on the other hand the beeping suggests that your
top 64k is still the factory BIOS bootblock, in which case BUC.TS
will be set=0, and then removing the NVRAM battery doesn't help,
because that only resets from 1 to 0.

If your top 64k is still the factory BIOS bootblock then something
went wrong when you flashed now. Upstream flashrom will have output
an error message. I would not recommend using anything else.


> > I wrote pretty clear step-by-step instructions for all this for the
> > X60 quite some time ago. I hope they are still available somewhere.
> 
> Did the instructions resemble this?
> https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x60/Installation

Yes, just that some descriptions are wrong.

The commands are still correct though, and older simpler content is there.

I also find it annoyingly confusing to link to random binaries from
libreboot.org.


> >> How do I fix the trackpoint
> >
> > AFAIK this is resolved by adding a delay to SeaBIOS. The coreboot build
> > system used to do so automatically, but maybe that has been broken, or
> > maybe it never was there for the T60.
> 
> Where is/was this delay?

git grep SEABIOS_PS2_TIMEOUT


> >> and get rid of the whine?
> >
> > Please research this problem and provide the project with a proper fix.
> 
> I'll see what I can do.  In 
> https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2014-June/078099.html you 
> suggested clever use of an oscilloscope.  Precisely where and how would 
> you suggest probing?

I can't tell you. The hard part is not to take a probe to the
mainboard, but to study the circuitry, understand it, find out
what is happening why and then construct a fix. I haven't.


//Peter