[coreboot] Ethernet/Wifi not working with coreboot/seabios/me_cleaner on a Thinkpad x230

[Martin Kepplinger]

Am 03.07.2017 17:23 schrieb Marcel Maci:
> Hi, I've flashed coreboot with seaBIOS and me_cleaner to my Thinkpad
> x230 and everything works fine except the network. Neither wifi nor
> ethernet works. Could this be a problem with the gbe.bin I've used
> (I extracted it with ifdtool -x from the factory bios and the first
> time I did this on another Thinkpad x230 it worked perfectly)?

You don't need to extract gbe.bin, descriptor.bin or me.bin for the 
X230. I
planned to update the wiki a little because I also found it to be not 
clear
enough:

So you are talking about external SPI flashing. There are 2 flash chips 
and
the gbe part is in the "second", 8MB one, together with the me and 
descriptor
parts. You really "need" to access this chip only once. What you want to 
do is
read it (obviously), run me_cleaner on it (you can use the whole image. 
me_cleaner
will recognise it and write a new one for you), and run ifdtool -u on it 
in order
to unlock internal writing from now on. That's it, so write that back. 
Until
me_cleaner or the libreboot people find a way to *really* remove the ME,
I guess you don't have to touch that 8MB chip anymore.

For the bios (coreboot with payload), you only need to access the 
"first", 4MB
chip, and you don't need any extracted binary blob when building 
coreboot for
this; they're part of the other one. (except for the video BIOS, if you 
want to).
When flashing (writing) *externally*, of course you have to cut out the 
4MB
from the 12MB that the coreboot build creates for you, like seen in the 
wiki.

When flashing *internally*, you can use the 12MB image as is, and use 
flashrom's
--layout feature, again using only the 4MB for flashing coreboot, 
leaving all
the rest untouched. So again, you don't need any extracted binary when 
building
coreboot.

hope that helps. Although I use an Atheros wifi chip on PCIe, it works 
just fine.

                          martin