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

[Marcel Maci]

Thx - so, if I understand correctly you mean that I can handle the to
chips separately? Which means:
- first step: read the 8MB chip, apply me_cleaner, unlock it and write
  it back
- second step: build coreboot (optionally with video bios extracted
  from original bios) and flash it to the 4MB chip
If this is true, it would mean that I could now flash back just the 8MB
of the stock firmware (applying me_cleaner and unlocking it before
flashing) and it should work fine with the upper 4MB (that contain
coreboot). I haven't tried that but I'm a little bit sceptical that it
will work...
Just in order to be clear about what I did (and what worked perfectly
on the another Thinkpad x230 to which I installed the same
coreboot/seabios/me_cleaner-configuration):
- I extracted both 8MB + 4MB stock firmware and concatenated them to
  one 12MB image
- I applied me_cleaner, unlocked it, extracted gbe.bin, me.bin,
  descriptor.bin and vbios.bin
- I built a 12MB coreboot-image adding those binary blobs
- I separated the image into lower 8MB and upper 4MB and flashed them
  back separately.
As I've said it worked perfectly for the other x230 I have and I don't
understand what's different with this one.


 Am Tue, 04 Jul 2017 14:05:07 +0200
schrieb Martin Kepplinger <martink at posteo.de>:

> 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
>