Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot

Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot(blog.aheymans.xyz)

41 points by walterbell 3 hours ago | 13 comments

lqet 58 minutes ago |

In early 2018, before I had children and with much, MUCH more free time, I bought a used X61, plus a used X60 1400x1050 LCD, a new backlight, new internal stereo speakers, a new mainboard with an Intel Core i7-5600U from 51NB, plus new SSD, 32 GB RAM, and the original IBM logo of a X60 which was replaced by a Lenovo logo on my chassis. It's the exact same setup as mentioned here [0], except that I built it myself from the individual parts for cost reasons.

The board arrived from Shenzhen after a month or so. I then had to manually fit (including drilling away some parts) the X60 LCD into the X61 chassis, which was extremely stressful. But in the end it all worked out perfectly. This X62 has been my private machine for 8 years now, and I always travel with it. The display still works perfectly, the 32 GB RAM are still more than enough, and it is still very easy to get X61 replacement batteries on Amazon. But the best thing is the form factor; this thing is just so neat and small and practical. Also the quality of the chassis is incredible. Apart from many, many scratches on the lid, it is still in flawless condition.

[0] https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/

M95D 31 minutes ago | |

I still use an X60 Tablet for travel, mostly as a terminal for the machines at home. Original CPU is good enough for VNC+Wireguard. AFAIK, there aren't any CPU/MB upgrades for X60/61 Tablet. I still like it because of the 4:3 screen.

I upgraded the screen to the 1400x1050 with a new display panel from china, but I had to cut the front screen protector and remove the "oil". It seems a little bit darker without that liquid inside and dust particles entered in that space. I couldn't find any LCD upgrade for the CCFL lamp at that time and now I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

I'd love to see a working coreboot for X60/61 Tablets that can still boot DOS and WinXP.

teaearlgraycold 39 minutes ago | |

That's kind of like my T430: https://danangell.com/blog/posts/my-t430/

I wish it could go up to 32GB though. And the i7 in there shows its age. But it's still usable with modern software!

Faaak 5 minutes ago | | |

I had a T420s which is a bit smaller than the T430 and I really loved this thing. Did my whole scholarship with it, even bought a second hand to have as a fail-safe. Really nice machine for its time

utopiah 26 minutes ago |

"Vibe reverse engineering" yep, was talking with a designer friend just yesterday who vibe coded a driver for his unsupported Wacom. He's not a developer but his pen tablet now works. It seems quite useful and efficient for this kind of work with a well established process (plug, get connectivity, do something, get data, do something else, get other data, transform that data (e.g. 0..1 mapped to a well defined resolution), validate) ideally over standards e.g. USB or BT capabilities.

Best of all he even published on Github the result so that, hopefully, others benefit from his effort without even having to do it again.

d3Xt3r 1 hour ago |

This 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).

taffydavid 1 hour ago |

I 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?

2b3a51 36 minutes ago | |

antiX linux v26 might be of interest. I have the 32 bit version with the older Linux kernel (5.18.x I recollect) on a live usb. No mysterious graphics freezes.

The more straight forward (and 64 bit) candidate would be Slackware 15.0 with a few of Alien Bob's slackbuilds.

But, of course, the retro computing approach mentioned by another poster would look really nice and be a conversation piece.

userbinator 1 hour ago | |

Windows 98SE.

Port any drivers you need with AI.

Only half-serious...

taffydavid 45 minutes ago | | |

I miss XP sometimes

userbinator 1 hour ago |

Sure, 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.

dlcarrier 1 hour ago | |

Yeah, it's pretty cut and dry. Constitutionally, only the federal government is allowed to regulate intellectual property, so re-implementing anything that isn't protected by a trademark, copyright, or patent is fair game, and trademarks don't cover design, copyright only covers media, and patents expire in 20 tears.

Even the clean-room isolation that Phoenix went through isn't legally required, it just makes nuisance lawsuits more difficult. BSD prevailed over UNIX System Laboratories, in their reimplementation of Unix, despite having directly worked with the source code.

Krutonium 1 hour ago | |

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...

zeafoamrun 1 hour ago |

Kudos for getting this done!

Sad that free BIOSes are so far behind modern hardware, but this is very necessary work.