[coreboot] [RFH] Status of the Lenovo X201

[Nico Huber]

On 02.05.2018 18:37, qtux wrote:
> Thanks for your detailed explanation. So in essence shall I ignore the
> messages or blacklist lpc_ich?

Yes, either ;)

> 
> Besides, while preparing the status report, I sometimes find a "Smashed
> stack detected in romstage!" message in the console log, just before
> ramstage is starting. Is there something to worry about there?

Um, yes. I think that's not good. But I wonder why it's not happening
consistently.

> 
> It may correlate with another issue I found: Sometimes (mostly after
> some experimentation) SeaBios loads a long time (about 10 to 20 seconds)
> and is not able to find my SATA drive (though, payloads from cbfs can
> still be loaded). Restarting with Ctrl+Alt+Del is sufficient in these
> cases to solve the issue until the next time I tinker with coreboot (in
> particular experimenting with me_cleaner seems to cause this issue quite
> often).

With the ME in general: Don't write it's firmware region unless you have
to test a change there. And in this case, don't touch the BIOS region.
After you have flashed the ME firmware you have to make incredibly sure
that it's reset and in a valid state (hard to tell because an error
state is expected with me_cleaner). Only then you can reason about core-
boot.

Even though some people are unhappy with limited access to the ME firm-
ware, the best thing to do during coreboot development is to keep it
locked (or write-protected at least).

Nico