[coreboot] Asus Vivobook 14 E406SA 1.0 - Intel ME

[Nico Huber]

Hi permanentjpeg,

On 23.05.2018 21:39, permanentjpeg at firemail.cc wrote:
> On 2018-05-23 19:32, permanentjpeg at firemail.cc wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I recently acquired an Asus Vivobook E406SA 1.0, which I have been
>> investigating to see if there is a possibility to port to coreboot.
>> While doing this, I seem to have found some weird information about
>> Intel ME on this laptop. Although the CPU was produced in 2016 and it
>> can be assumed that it includes Intel ME, all the tests I've done come
>> up with the conclusion that it doesn't. I've included some detailed
>> logs in an attachment 'me.txt'. Going forward, what can I do to verify
>> if this laptop does have Intel ME or not? Flashrom doesn't support
>> laptops well and I don't have the ability to risk bricking this laptop
>> currently, is there another option to read the flash chip in this?
>>
>> - permanentjpeg
> 
> I forgot the attachment. Whoops.

it has an Atom based SoC. These do not have a Management Engine but a
Trusted Execution Engine (TXE, or later Converged Security Engine, CSE,
not sure about that name). The latter doesn't provide management fea-
tures like AMT but is about the same as the ME otherwise (another con-
troller in the chip(set) running a huge amount of, from my point of
view, untrusted code). I don't know, but expect, that it also (like the
ME) is more privileged than the actual x86 cores.

Nico