I have that problem too of buying many old laptops... I had an ASUS Eee PC phase and I bought 6 of them (3 different models and replacement parts).
Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can get much more modern hardware with firmware. This was mostly an expirement to see how good LLM are at reverse engineering. Given that it went well I think making fully free (without Intel) x86-side firmware is possible.
Companies put a ton of work into proprietary RAM training algorithms that I think would be hard to replicate. I know AMD has open sourced their older pre-Zen BIOS and that has made its way into coreboot, but Zen1+ is all proprietary.
Most are using synopsys IP I think, so they don't really have a say in it.
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#53Ok
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#54Ch341a to the rescue.
On my todo, i still have the pet project to make a simple libusb c project to control its gpios. The documentation id not very clear, and implémentations scarce. Now with LLMs i could make some progress.
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#55Sure, 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 fun…
> but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement
Interesting legal question: if Claude reverse engineers the original and writes a spec, and ChatGPT implements the spec without seeing the original, is that a clean-room implementation? Asking for a friend with a trillion parameters
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#56just 7-8 thinkpads is not an addiction :)
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#57This 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 (Op…
The GL-iNet travel router is such an OpenWRT success story. I think I can install OpenWRT on it, but it's open enough that it does everything I want without having to.
Re: Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fun…
> but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement Interesting legal question: if Claude reverse engineers the original and writes a spec, and ChatGPT implements the spec without seeing the original, is that a clean-room implementation? Asking for a friend with a trillion parameters
Depends? Honestly if you just cleaned Claude's memory (or had 2 distinct instances that can't communicate other than the spec), claude could do both.
But honestly this is going to have to be tested in court. Also, IANAL.