Board:lenovo/x230

Status

Thanks for your interest in Lenovo X230 port. Issues:

• no MRC cache (longer boot time)
• yellow USB port isn't powered in power-off state.
• Badly seated RAM may prevent booting (not really a problem but coreboot is more suspicious to this than vendor BIOS)

Tested:

• S3 (Suspend to RAM)
• RAM module combinations of 8G+8G, 8G+0, 0+8G, 4G+8G, 8G+4G, 8G+1G, 1G+0, 0+1G, 4G+0, 0+4G
• USB (both 2.0 and 3.0 ports)
• Video (both internal and VGA)
• Expresscard slot (including hotplugging)
• Sound (integrated speakers, integrated mic, external headphones, external mic)
• LAN
• mini-PCIe slots (both wlan and wwan)
• Linux (through GRUB-as-payload)
• Windows (through GRUB-as-payload loading SeaBIOS image from disk; you have to use extracted VGA blob, dumped from memory isn't good enough)
• SD card slot
• Thermal management
• Fingerprint reader.
• Webcam
• trackpoint
• touchpad
• Fn hotkeys
• Keyboard backlight
• Thinklight.
• bluetooth
• dock
• msata (fixed in commit c8f54a1109072706e2fa091dc9ab4ad3eb057b42)

Not tested:

• mini displayport (probably works)
• digitizer on x230t variant (may need work, if you have x230t and install coreboot on it please contact us)

proprietary components status

• CPU Microcode
• VGA option rom (optional): you need it if you wantgraphics in SeaBIOS but most payloads should work without it (text mode or corebootfb mode)
• ME(Management Engine) => you do not have to touch it(just leave it where it is)
• EC(Embedded Controller) => you do not have to touch it(just leave it where it is)

Code

• The code has been merged into coreboot master

 $ git clone http://review.coreboot.org/p/coreboot

Flashing

X230 has 2 flash chips of 8M and 4M. They're concatenated to one virtual flash chip of 12M which is itself subdivided in roughly in 3 parts:

• Descriptor (12K)
• ME firmware (5M-12K)
• System flash (7M)

ME firmware is not readable. Vendor firmware locks the flash and so you need to flash externally (unless until someone figures out a way around it).

• 
• 
• 

Proceeds as follows:

• Turn off your laptop, remove battery and AC adapter.
• Remove the keyboard.
• Connect your external SPI flasher to the top SPI chip which is under palm resting space, on left side of the board. It's a 4M chip. IF you've chosen CBFS_SIZE 4M or smaller that' the only chip you need to reflash.

I recommend using SOIC clip. Depending on the flasher you use, you may have to use separate 3.3V source. Make sure not to feed more than 3.3V ot the chip. I used buspirate as flasher and 3.3V power lines from another computer.

• Read the flash. Twice. Compare the files to be sure. Save a copy of it on

external media.

flashrom -p <yourprogrammer> -r flash.bin
flashrom -p <yourprogrammer> -r flash2.bin
diff flash.bin flash2.bin

If they don't match, do not proceed. If the file is 8M, you're flashing wrong chip, connec to the right one.

• Write the flash. Since you have to write only top 4M, first split out those 4M:

 dd of=top.rom bs=1M if=build/coreboot.rom skip=8

• Use flashrom to flash top.rom.

If you have trouble reading the chip successfully, the most common problems are

• insufficient power supply
• bad contacts
• too long wires
• bad pinout

The cable shipped with buspirate was too long, and needed to be trimmed.

See also In-System Programming