[flashrom] SUCCESS: MX25L1605 on Thinkpad X60s [was: FAILED]

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Tue Apr 24 22:30:24 CEST 2012


Motiejus Jakštys wrote:
> indeed it worked! Computer is now booted from SeaBios. :)

Great! Please make sure to also follow the remaining steps, in
particular to re-set BUC.TS back to 0, and it's also good to flash a
new coreboot.rom.

An unpatched flashrom should succeed without any errors when the
machine runs coreboot.


> Instead of:
> 
> then run dd if=coreboot.rom bs=1 \
>  skip=$[sizeof(coreboot.rom) - 0x10000] count=64k | hexdump
> 
> Should be:
> then run dd if=coreboot.rom bs=1 \
>  skip=$[sizeof(coreboot.rom) - 0x20000] count=64k | hexdump

Ah yes to verify that the copying was successful. Thank you!


> However, there are two caveats:
> 
> 1) major one. There is silent squeeking which is heard from the fan
> slot. It gives me head pain after seconds. The only way to stop it
> seems to be to give processor some activity (when I start programs, use
> dd or cpuburn it stops. Immediately when activity finishes the sound is
> heard once again).

I blame this on poor quality of the power supply electronics in the
laptop.

When the processor switches between different performance states
the power supply generates an audible noise.

Because the CPU switches very frequently between different
performance states the audible noise is heard constantly, except
when the CPU remains fully used.

The workaround I use is to add idle=halt to the kernel command line.
This means that power consumption is higher than otherwise, but to me
it is most important that the machine is silent.

I have a 2.0 GHz CPU, but I must limit this to 996 MHz in order to
not have the machine overheat during use. This is the same for me
regardless of which firmware is used, happens both with factory BIOS
and coreboot+SeaBIOS.

In my start scripts I have:

cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq && {
        echo userspace > scaling_governor
        echo 996000 > scaling_max_freq
}

This of course helps compensate for the shorter battery runtime with
idle=halt.

Now, there is also a possibility that coreboot can do something to
work around this situation, similarly to what the factory BIOS
obviously does, since the noise is not present there, but this has
not been researched.

I have experienced the same issue with factory BIOS on an X40, when
the machine was old. This confirms that the components used in the
power supply have worn out.


> 1) booting Linux from USB stick takes for ever. (loading kernel and
> initrd takes >10 minutes). However, USB performance is fine when
> booted from hard drive.

This is a SeaBIOS issue. Recommend to post about this on the SeaBIOS
mailing list.


I'm glad to hear that it works for you!


//Peter




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