[coreboot] Coreboot on X230 and Dualboot / How to make it work

[One7two99]

Hello Peter,

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [coreboot] Coreboot on X230 and Dualboot / How to make it work
Local Time: 26 September 2017 11:05 AM
From: peter at stuge.se

>> 1) How to get Coreboot running (general part)
> The 1) is quite a large topic.

Strangely that part seems to much easier as there is already excellent documentation available how to install all dependencies, build the toolchain.
I've verified this several times by installing coreboot on a freshly installed Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS.

>> I"ve followed the howto in the coreboot wiki:
> Sure, but what do the steps in the howto actually mean?
> Why are you sure that they are correct?

I am not sure that is why I am asking :-) And I got already different answers.

>> honestly I was also wondering why this is working and even more,
>> why I am skipping the first 8MB of the file.
> Perfect! Please also *answer* those questions; they are important.

I good a better understanding after looking at the picture one the me_cleaner site here:
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/wiki/External-flashing
This picture shows the content of the Chip:
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3ea0ff670edb94372124ad0c36bd5e2b3c522f7e/687474703a2f2f6f6936352e74696e797069632e636f6d2f3130726e3132642e6a7067
I got confused in the beginning as the X230 contains two chips which are see as one 12 MB chip.

As I have saved the original content of both of my chips (x230-4mb.rom and x230-8m.rom) I have already looked at the content of the 8 MB chip:

cd ~/coreboot/MyFactoryROM
ifdtool -x x230_8mb.rom

will extract 4 files:
flashregion_0_flashdescriptor.bin (4K) --> renamed to: descriptor.bin
flashregion_1_bios.bin (4,8M)
flashregion_2_intel_me.bin (5,0M)--> renamed to: me.bin
flashregion_3_gbe.bin (8,0K)-- > renamed to: gbe.bin

I have verified the ME image as described here
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/wiki/External-flashing

cd ~/coreboot/MyFactoryROM
~/me_cleaner/me_cleaner.py -c x230_8mb.rom

   Full image detected
   The ME/TXE region goes from 0x3000 to 0x500000
   Found FPT header at 0x3010
   Found 23 partition(s)
   Found FTPR header: FTPR partition spans from 0x183000 to 0x24d000
   ME/TXE firmware version 8.1.71.3608
   Checking the FTPR RSA signature... VALID

Strangely the 8MB chips seems to also contains the "flashregion_1_bios.bin".
I tought that the BIOS part is located on the top 4 MB Chip.
I'd like to both files (4MB + 8MB) into one and use that with idftool.
I tried to run idftool with --chip 1 on the extracted x230-4mb.rom but this didn't succeed.

Next step is to clean the flashregion_2_intel_me.bin (me.bin) with me_cleaner which is describe well.

QUESTION:
what I am really struggling with is, is the size of the CBFS filesystem in ROM (can be set under Mainboard in coreboot make nconfig). I need a bigger CBFS to be able to run payloads but then I can't just flash the upper 4 MB chip.
As such the question is: what do I need to do with the coreboot.bin after compiling to be able to flash the whole 12 MB (4 mb chip + 12 mb chip).
Any help would be great here, as I am currently mainly struggling with this.

[799]
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