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

Zoran Stojsavljevic zoran.stojsavljevic at gmail.com
Wed Jul 5 08:10:16 CEST 2017


To whom It May Concern,

Please, when you have such kind of problems, as Marcel, could you attach
latest dmesg log? For saving lot of effort of other people on this list. :-)

Thank you,
Zoran

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Martin Kepplinger <martink at posteo.de> wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>>
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