Back when I used to have an X270 I had a shell script that ran on boot which poked a register to disable thermal throttling handling. Not at all ideal, but it made the machine usable in the absence of official Lenovo batteries which they stopped manufacturing pretty damn quickly.
[1]: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlesto...
This was fine until the machines randomly started setting PROCHOT on genuine power adapters that were fully plugged in. Eventually I just deployed a configuration with PDQ to all the machines that ran ThrottleStop in the background with a configuration that disabled PROCHOT on login.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to consistently disable PROCHOT pre-login, so students and teachers in my labs would consistently wait 3-4 minutes while the machines chugged along at 700 MHz as they prepared their accounts.
Dell disables that tinkering on some models of XPS in BIOS/EC so ThrottleStop won't to jack.
can confirm, works great to bypass throttling when 60W supply on X230
It is still somewhere on a shelf, so maybe its day will come again.
As a former owner of a T470, Lenovo included a pretty beefy component from intel that was supposed to be feature complete by itself for dynamically managing thermals, including funky ideas like detecting if you were potentially using the laptop on your legs etc. and reducing thermals then, but giving full power when running plugged on the desk.
Time comes for delivery, Lenovo finds out that intel did a half-assed job (not the first time, compare Rapid Start "hibernation" driver earlier) and the result is kabylake T470 (and X270 which share most of the design) having broken thermals when running anything other than windows without special intel driver, thus leading to funny tools that run in a loop picking at an MSR in the CPU in a constant whack-a-mole with piece of code deep in firmware.
Why though? Not a single reason mentioned in post about why would it be better than whatever stock BIOS the laptop is shipped with.
Thanks to Intel, who has invented the completely unnecessary System Management Mode, to compensate for the laziness of Microsoft, who could not be bothered to update MS-DOS and Windows with some features required in modern computers, now the BIOS has the ability to do whatever it wants on your computer, without this being detectable by the owner.
Hopefully the BIOS writers do not abuse this, and the many problems caused by BIOSes are due to unintentional bugs and not due to malice, but it would still better to be certain that your firmware does not do anything nefarious.
When debugging hardware problems, it is also much simpler when you are certain about what the computer really does, instead of not knowing whether the BIOS takes control when certain hardware events happen, overriding any policies that you may try to implement in your operating system.
Replacing the proprietary BIOS still does not provide complete control over what you own, as there are auxiliary CPUs with their own agenda, but it is still much closer to full control than when you do not know what the BIOS does.
Unfortunately, they have. Multiple examples from the excellent Cathode Ray Dude:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5M0TwnkWUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
This can be confusing on HN, I know.
Reading https://libreboot.org/#why-use-libreboot might provide further enlightenment.
I suppose if nothing else, you can run a more up to date firmware if the vendor stopped supporting yours, but I have no idea what that means in a practical sense.
If I weren't using binary blobs in the firmware, I think I would have more trouble, but that is Canoeboot to my knowledge, not Libreboot. ^^
Yes, if you live and organize your life around things that are unlikely to happen to you, but only because they've happened ONCE to someone else, typically a high value target by state actors, that's called paranoia.
Most people are not gonna be targeted via BIOS hacks. From state actors to online scammers they all have easier ways to getting your data remotely.
This is not really true:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...
Normal people don't live in constant fear daily over something that happened once and caused no losses.
1. Firmware contains bugs. Old proprietary firmware tends to not get fixes. If you switch to an open source version, you can get the bugs fixed.
(Edit) 1.a. Old proprietary firmware also doesn't tend to get new features, and open source replacements can cover that. (eg. booting over HTTP(S) or security features to help against Evil Maid attacks)
2. Libreboot claims to be faster to boot than the vendor firmware. Depending on the particular device/firmware, that wouldn't surprise me at all.
Lenovo does have a history with installing a very obvious spyware rootkit on their consumer PCs[0].
[0]https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/ps500035-s...
As far as I'm aware, it has less functionality than the OEM, so you use it to _remove_ features (good and/or bad).
Aside from that, I suppose it means you can run a more up to date firmware if yours is no longer maintained, but I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.
There's also the "hyper paranoid" fork "canoeboot" which has no proprietary blobs, and presumably _even less_ functionality.
The short answer is; if you don't know why you want it or need it, you probably don't.
I’ve messed around with porting coreboot on two desktop platforms but always had the benefit of a HW serial port…
The console viewing itself was provided by `cbmem -1`, which I could run via a NixOS live USB with nixpkgs#coreboot-utils
There were a lot of reports about those things having power or heat firmware problems?
It's incredibly portable, when you take it out of the box you wonder if it's not too small (it's not, it's a perfect size :)).
Battery endurance is good, at least for me. You won't make 10h flights while compiling Chromium though. Get the LCD instead of the OLED if you can, the OLED looks good but uses way more battery I hear.
If you can find it in the max config (64GB, 7840u, 2TB) it's going to make you happy for a long, long time I think.
I don't know what I will use after it dies. There's nothing comparable in portability, power and build quality (which is really, really amazing).
I agree with you: this thing, a few mm thicker and heavier due to beefier heatsink, with a Ryzen 395+ and 128GB would be so incredible. I'd dump so much money into that...
More broadly: faster boot times (sub-second POST is common), no vendor bloat or hidden phone-home behavior in the firmware, and you can actually audit what runs before your OS loads. That last one matters more than people think. Your BIOS has full access to everything on the machine before any OS-level security even starts.
A few years ago, I got an X270 since my T430 was feeling sluggish. I'd be curious to try this!
My X270 has a 7th-gen core i5, is that Kaby Lake? Does coreboot/libreboot on the X270 need SeaBIOS or will it work with Tianocore?
Ah, todsacerdoti. ;)
(the user who posted my blog post is not me :p)