Port Heads to T480

[doritos4mlady]

Looks like a great candidate as it recently got libreboot support and is much faster newer than the T420/T430.

Is this something the devs would be interested in supporting?

[notgivenby]

The platform may be indeed attractive. I am not sure about being much faster. i7 3740qm/3840qm which can be installed on t420/t430 performs similar to i7 8550u. The newer CPU are less hungry though (45W vs 15 W). Both are EOL in terms of microcode updates. One issue for heads could be the TPM problem.
https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html "The TPM is disabled on this device, to prevent hanging/boot delay in SeaBIOS, due to buggy TPM drivers there." Is this true only for SeaBIOS or for GRUB too?

[tlaurion]

Some discussion over Heads matrix channel thread on porting process for t480 if thread discussion is better for you to organize leadership of this port.

[tlaurion]

TPM works under coreboot but is "vulnerable to gpio reset attack" source

[tlaurion]

@notgivenby

"The TPM is disabled on this device, to prevent hanging/boot delay in SeaBIOS, due to buggy TPM drivers there." Is this true only for SeaBIOS or for GRUB too?

Would not be relevant to Heads in any case.

Any board owner here willing to take leadership into starting and leading the port?

[akunterkontrolle]

Just want to chime in that I am the happy new owner of a T480 which I explicitly bought for playing around with coreboot and the hope to ultimately run heads. So I am more than willing to help with the port and test, but I don't think I am qualified to take the leadership in any way.

Maybe to add my perspective on why the T480(s) is an interesting platform: Yes, it is indeed not more powerful than a e.g. a maxed out t440p (which is sad) but uses way less power (good thing on a Laptop) and has all the bells and whistles of USB-C (which is helpful e.g. at my workplace where we have set up monitors to act as a USB-C dock). And while not faster, it is much quieter then my t440p under load.

[tlaurion]

TPM works under coreboot but is "vulnerable to gpio reset attack" source

https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/576

[notgivenby]

@doritos4mlady @akunterkontrolle I am trying to evaluate if it is really a good investment in a hobby project. Would you be interested in a community effort of porting heads to t480? Do you know anybody else who would be interested and would/can contribute to the effort?

Board advantages:
The IPS panel is good (in comparison to t430, x230). You can put up to 64gb RAM, which is good for example for Qubes OS. It is not that expensive (2x32gb sodimm ddr4 3200 costs around 100$). It is much lighter than t430 too. The SPI chip is very easy to access. One need to remove only the back panel which has only 4 screws or so. The used board itself depending on the condition is also around 250-300$. I even found couple of refurbished boards on Amazon/ebay. In European countries, it means you have a 1 year warranty and can return it for free in 14 days. So the chances are high that will have couple of users interested. This means the port may be of use for the whole community.

Some questions/obstacles :

1. Is your Thunderbolt firmware’s spi chip free? Mine has this https://matrix.to/#/!pAlHOfxQNPXOgFGTmo:matrix.org/$BHJDXHAaVjaQyrYu6UVtDyC425Da_y5AuGUzFZP0a2E?via=matrix.org&via=nitro.chat&via=envs.net
   
2. Are you guys able to see the cpu temperature sensors and do fans work after flashing libreboot? There was one issue perhaps a single one https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/t480-problems-after-librebooting/31427/12
3. TPM GPIO vulnarability better to be fixed otherwise the board is not reasonably safe under heads https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/576 https://mkukri.xyz/2024/06/01/tpm-gpio-fail.html. Since it maybe relevant to other boards it is likely that it will be fixed.
4. @tlaurion in case we screw with the porting by our self would you mind to share in which range of consulting fee we may motivate you to do that? We would have the boards bought and if 10 people would donate like 100$ each which is kind of sum you expect for transition from dasharo to dasharo/heads would it be enouph? I have no ideas how expensive it can be, so if it is too low please do not take it personally. Perhaps community effort would be also to find some money for that.

[mkopec]

Is your spi chip free? Mine has this https://matrix.to/#/!pAlHOfxQNPXOgFGTmo:matrix.org/$BHJDXHAaVjaQyrYu6UVtDyC425Da_y5AuGUzFZP0a2E?via=matrix.org&via=nitro.chat&via=envs.net

That's not the BIOS SPI flash, the BIOS flash sits close to the middle of the board and is 16MB

[notgivenby]

Is your spi chip free? Mine has this https://matrix.to/#/!pAlHOfxQNPXOgFGTmo:matrix.org/$BHJDXHAaVjaQyrYu6UVtDyC425Da_y5AuGUzFZP0a2E?via=matrix.org&via=nitro.chat&via=envs.net

That's not the BIOS SPI flash, the BIOS flash sits close to the middle of the board and is 16MB

It is Thunderbolt firmware’s SPI flash, corrected...

[akunterkontrolle]

@doritos4mlady @akunterkontrolle I am trying to evaluate if it is really a good investment in a hobby project. Would you be interested in a community effort of porting heads to t480? Do you know anybody else who would be interested and would/can contribute to the effort?

I am certainly interested in a community effort to port heads to the t480 (note: not the t480s, I got the t480 and it is highly unlikely that I will get a t480s as well). I do not know anybody else who could be interested though.

Board advantages: The IPS panel is good (in comparison to t430, x230). You can put up to 64gb RAM, which is good for example for Qubes OS. It is not that expensive (2x32gb sodimm ddr4 3200 costs around 100$). It is much lighter than t430 too. The SPI chip is very easy to access. One need to remove only the back panel which has only 4 screws or so. The used board itself depending on the condition is also around 250-300$. I even found couple of refurbished boards on Amazon/ebay. In European countries, it means you have a 1 year warranty and can return it for free in 14 days. So the chances are high that will have couple of users interested. This means the port may be of use for the whole community.

Fully agree. I just flashed Libreboot a few minutes ago for the first time and the hardware-based flashing was so much less painful compared to the t440p. I think I even managed this time to not break any plastic clips, yeah!

Some questions/obstacles :

1. Is your Thunderbolt firmware’s spi chip free? Mine has this https://matrix.to/#/!pAlHOfxQNPXOgFGTmo:matrix.org/$BHJDXHAaVjaQyrYu6UVtDyC425Da_y5AuGUzFZP0a2E?via=matrix.org&via=nitro.chat&via=envs.net
   

Well should have read that first, I had it open just minutes ago but did not look closely at the Thunderbolt chip. However, I do not remember having seen any obstacles around it. Although, I am not sure if it matters, because you can easily upgrade the Thunderbolt firmware via software with fwupdmgr from within Linux (at least if your fwupd version is recent enough, Debian/Devuan stable obviously lagging behind). I am not sure why Libreboot recommends flashing that directly with a hardware programmer as well. Maybe they are not aware of the possibility of updating from within Linux.

2. Are you guys able to see the cpu temperature sensors and do fans work after flashing libreboot? There was one issue perhaps a single one https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/t480-problems-after-librebooting/31427/12

Fans work and spin up automatically. I can see the cpu temp sensors but no fan speed and the thinkpad_acpi module does not load. I have to check if the force option will do anything.

3. TPM GPIO vulnarability better to be fixed otherwise the board is not reasonably safe under heads https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/576 https://mkukri.xyz/2024/06/01/tpm-gpio-fail.html. Since it maybe relevant to other boards it is likely that it will be fixed.

Yep. Sadly, this is something I can probably not help with at all. I don't thin I even understand fully how that attack works in the first place.

4. @tlaurion in case we screw with the porting by our self would you mind to share in which range of consulting fee we may motivate you to do that? We would have the boards bought and if 10 people would donate like 100$ each which is kind of sum you expect for transition from dasharo to dasharo/heads would it be enouph? I have no ideas how expensive it can be, so if it is too low please do not take it personally. Perhaps community effort would be also to find some money for that.

My current plan on how to get heads to the t480 is as following and probably a very bad idea that will result in burning Thinkpads:

1. Copy-and-past the coreboot config for the t480 from libreboot.
2. Take the kernel config from the t440p.
3. Copy the blobs (me and stuff) created by libreboot into appropriate folders for heads
4. Compile heads with a new t480 target and profit?

This may work at least as a proof-of-concept and we could go from there.

[tlaurion]

My current plan on how to get heads to the t480 is as following and probably a very bad idea that will result in burning Thinkpads:

1. Copy-and-past the coreboot config for the t480 from libreboot.

2. Take the kernel config from the t440p.

3. Copy the blobs (me and stuff) created by libreboot into appropriate folders for heads

4. Compile heads with a new t480 target and profit?

This may work at least as a proof-of-concept and we could go from there.

@akunterkontrolle That sounds like a plan! Do the initial steps!
Inspect coreboot config for t440p, compare with libreboot config which will point to binaries expected in some paths.
You will then realize that heads have scripts under blobs/* which does the magic, called by board configs (which are basically Makefiles, including other makefiles, which calls those scripts to blobs are where expected. Those scripts need to be duplicated, but from what I read from https://ezntek.com/posts/librebooting-the-thinkpad-t480-20241207t0933/#back-to-compiling-libreboot combined by a lbmk code inspection, you should be able real quick to

• Add coreboot fork under modules/coreboot
• have boards/t440p copied to t480 and adapt, coreboot version to what was modified into modules/coreboot
• adapt board config to point to adapted linux config
• add a new targets/t480.mk which deals with calling blobs/* download and extraction of blobs putting them in proper places
• add copy config/coreboot-t440p to config/coreboot-t480, adapt it to point to proper blobs paths, adapted per libreboot borrowed config
• modify .circleci/config.yml to add t480, start by depending on mulsc directly just like x230-maximized-hotp does, no need to reuse caches for now
• Create an initial PR, with commits relative roughly to the steps above

Then lets collaborate in the PR you will create. Don't forget to create a heads fork in your own repository, follow/comment linuxboot/heads-wiki#119 as you go, make sure you sign commits and don't stress too much if this seems a lot. Just get a PR started and we will collaborate there. I will guide you to what is Heads specific, but will leave you lead the thing and help you when needed. Don't foget to tag me along the way @tlaurion

@tlaurion in case we screw with the porting by our self would you mind to share in which range of consulting fee we may motivate you to do that? We would have the boards bought and if 10 people would donate like 100$ each which is kind of sum you expect for transition from dasharo to dasharo/heads would it be enouph? I have no ideas how expensive it can be, so if it is too low please do not take it personally. Perhaps community effort would be also to find some money for that.

I helped before for many ports. Those ports can all be used for references, in which I went in extensive lengths to become redundant at some point. This is a time to test this, and take notes of the process involved if you want to help, so that https://osresearch.net/Porting/ is updated by your notes. If this is done properly, and PRs fixing docs along the way is done, that would be a fruitful, free as in free beer, on my side. If I have to work and do the port by myself, we will quickly go into consultation services discussion in PR. Ideally, someone takes the lead and I mentor so that I do not become the only person doing ports under Heads.

The hard part is getting a coreboot port. After that, its learning how to plumbing is done. If you are that willing leader @akunterkontrolle , and are willing to learn and my time investment into mentoring is not lost to the void, i'm willing to do this for free, at the cost of you helping me helping others to do Heads ports in the future and becoming first responder board tester in the future when there is coreboot version bumps and linux kernel version bumps, with others in this room being willing to become second testers as described under https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/master/BOARD_TESTERS.md

Heads needs other heads.

[akunterkontrolle]

Thank you very much for that detailed plan on how a port of heads for the t480 could come along! @tlaurion

I will do my best to read up on the various things like signing my git commits. I knew that this is a thing but have never done it myself before so I am sure I will be on a fun ride :D

Well, it seems that I have now "taken the lead" somewhat … Well, I promise I will do my best and I am sure there will be some result at the end. I will try to document my work as best as I can to help the documentation. However, I will say upfront, that it could take a bit until results show up. Sadly this is just a hobby and for various unfair reasons I have to do other stuff as well …

[notgivenby]

Yesterday I started to compare the coreboot configs like outlined in the plan. My t480 will arrive tomorrow. @akunterkontrolle what would be the best way to communicate during the port and help you?

[mblanqui]

I don't know if this would impact the Heads config, but there a couple of things worth mentioning about the T480. It has two variants: one with integrated graphics, and another with integrated & dedicated graphics. At present, the dedicated graphics do not function in coreboot and are essentially disabled by default.

Additionally, in light of the previous X230 maximised config, the T480 has become a commonly modified laptop by the ThinkPad community with do-it-yourself screen replacements at 1440p and 4K being fairly popular.