[flashrom] x1 Carbon 1st Gen Boots to Black Screen

Nico Huber nico.h at gmx.de
Sat Jan 27 14:20:14 CET 2018


Hi,

the coreboot mailing list is a much better place for this, let's move it
there.

On 27.01.2018 11:13, realraw at tuta.io wrote:
> Followed the coreboot wiki entry perfectly, and had no issues reading
> the flash chip.

That wiki page seems to mention outdated .config settings. Generally
I'd advice to start with a clean config (e.g. make distclean), only
select your mainboard and leave everything else at the defaults. This
won't give you maximum features but is most likely to show something
on the screen ;)

> 
> The 4MB Bios chip in my x1 differs from the Wiki Entry:
> 
> Found Micron/Numonyx/ST flash chip "N25Q032..3E" (4096 kB, SPI) on
> linux_spi.
> 
> Not sure if that impacts anything, however booting I am faced with a
> Black Screen.  Fan is not running at all, and appears nothing is
> happening.

If it's not about some misconfiguration or the VBIOS, another possible
issue is that coreboot doesn't know your RAM configuration. The X1 has
its RAM soldered to the mainboard instead of DIMMs. The latter would
have SPD EEPROMs storing information about the RAM but with soldered-
down RAM, that information has to be added to coreboot.

In mainboard_get_spd() (src/mainboard/lenovo/x1_carbon_gen1/romstage.c)
there are two GPIOs checked. I'd first try to find out the state of
these GPIOs and see if coreboot already knows that configuration. When
you reflash your backup and boot with the vendor BIOS, please run
`inteltool -g` (see util/inteltool/ in the coreboot tree) and attach
the output.

> 
> I found this link as well:
> http://coreboot.coreboot.narkive.com/zUOsG1zN/lenovo-x1-carbon-3460-screen-stays-black
> 
> Flashed the rom at the end of the suggested mailing list comment, and
> still black screen.  
> 
> I have included the vbios in my build, so I'm not sure what's wrong.

Many things can go wrong with a VBIOS. It's generally safer to use
coreboot's native graphics init (or libgfxinit) for the first coreboot
build because you can't (mis)configure anything.

Nico



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