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

[Martin Kepplinger]

Am 04.07.2017 18:20 schrieb 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...

Sure you can handle the chips completely seperately. That's how did it
when initially doing external SPI flashing.

> 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.
> 

I guess that should be the same. Your problem may be unrelated to 
flashing,
as suggested by others here.

> 
>  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
>>