Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
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Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
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Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#2Sure, USA citizens are not allowed to reverse engineer
...yes we are? After all, that's how the whole IBM PC-compatible industry started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t...
AFAIK the later Thinkpads including this one uses a Phoenix BIOS, so it's amusing to see the circularity of how things turned out; and continuing on that path, Phoenix sold its BIOS business to Lenovo a little earlier this year.
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#3Kudos for getting this done!
Sad that free BIOSes are so far behind modern hardware, but this is very necessary work.
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#4This is really, really cool. I wonder, by extension, if it's feasible to reverse engineer all the various low-level firmware blobs too and have it hosted on LVFS so users can update it via fwupd (not sure if LVFS would be willing to host such firmware though).
But I would really like to see this trend take off, so we can take back control over smart devices and see more FOSS firmware pushed out to various devices (OpenWRT etc).
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#5[dead]
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#6I have an x61 myself, bought it last year to add to my Thinkpad collection. I haven't done much besides put in some real to verify it actually works. And suggestions on an OS?
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#7[dead]
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#8I have an x61 myself, bought it last year to add to my Thinkpad collection. I haven't done much besides put in some real to verify it actually works. And suggestions on an OS?
Windows 98SE.
Port any drivers you need with AI.
Only half-serious...
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#9Sure, USA citizens are not allowed to reverse engineer ...yes we are? After all, that's how the whole IBM PC-compatible industry started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t... AFAIK the later Thinkpads including this one uses a Phoenix BIOS, so it's amusing to see the circularity of how things turned out; and continuing on that path, Phoenix sold its BIOS business to Lenovo a little earlier…
As with many things, this is a case of "it depends" - How you do it and for what reason, primarily. If you're reverse engineering code that's part of a DRM scheme for example, that's explicitly not allowed.
Coreboot is debatable for this, it's fine in the sense that nobody is going to come after you for it, but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement, which is fundamentally different to the Phoenix BIOS clone, and not in a good way.
But as I said, nobody is going to come after you for it so...
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#10I have an x61 myself, bought it last year to add to my Thinkpad collection. I haven't done much besides put in some real to verify it actually works. And suggestions on an OS?
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