Comment by utensil4778 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by utensil4778 | Hacker News Reader

I had to do a similar thing with my T530. I wanted to upgrade to a WiFi 6+Bluetooth card. The built in Bluetooth adapter is very old, I think v4.2. It's also a finicky module with a mezzanine connector, and it's nestled deeply into the internal magnesium frame so the range is abysmal.

I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist, but I'm left with a bigger problem. The WiFi slot offers PCI, but not USB. The WWAN slot has USB, but not PCI.

I ended up tapping into the original Bluetooth connector to steal the USB lines and route them back to the PCI connector.

I had some issues at first with the device not enumerating reliably, but it eventually settled down.

Now I have WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5. Unfortunately the WiFi frontend is extremely bad (it's a Chinese knockoff) and I have pretty bad signal strength even literally on top of the router. But it works well enough and my Bluetooth headphones now work more than 10ft away from the machine.

The major problem is that the only WiFi 6 card available in mini PCIe is knockoff Intel AX210 cards. I suppose that's fair, mPCIe is basically obsolete these days. Unfortunately I don't have space for a M.2 or other adapter. Maybe I could build a custom express card

>I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist

Still boggles my mind that people praise ThinkPads as an option for those looking for repairability and upgradability while casually talking about the built-in BIOS whitelist designed to block all that.

To me that means an instant black ball.

It's cool hackers are patching this out, but this anti-consumer feature should not be present in the first place in something people recommend.

The hardware itself (on most thinkpads I’ve owned anyway) is really nice to work on, with service manuals available, lots of parts, good community support.

Flashing the BIOS is also usually well documented.

I wish the BIOS flashing was not needed tbh, but at least it’s possible.

I run Libreboot on my ThinkPad and it works great.

I have to wonder if there's a project for patching out this stupid, blatantly anticompetitive restriction from old ThinkPad firmwares. Especially with how many techies swear by these things.

Yes, there is... that is literally what the GP did.

Lots of other laptops has the same whitelist annoyance, and are harder to tinker with. Lenovo is still nearly the least cumbersome even with this.

Sony laptops were the worst: Sony has elitist culture when it comes to miniaturization and engineering excellence, which manifests as unsolderable gapless tiny solder pads in case with PCBs. Fujitsu is better: they love to get creative with their own testing criteria that results in excessively hot laptops that relies on keyboard typing surfaces as heatsinks. Toshiba designers seem to be smart and rational people who understands that no one cares if they double sided everything. Dell is just thick and heavy while not particularly durable and occasionally being annoying with proprietary accessories. HP seem to have every hardware and software imported into their ERP and that can be annoying sometimes like having HP-only bugs.

ThinkPads don't have that kinds of things. They note on Hardware Maintenance Manual(HMM) that all removed screws must be discarded and replaced with their beautiful urethane coated and thread locked screws, and they still haven't made value of ~220 as default for `/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity`, and that's it.

>Lots of other laptops has the same whitelist annoyance

Which other brands?

Like all of it. It's a feature in BIOS, and commercial BIOS is sourced from Phoenix, AMI, Insyde, etc. It's like asking which car brand use Brembo disc brakes. It's up to designers and model dependent.

That wasn't the question. I only know of Lenovo Thinkpads doing this heinous act.

They only do it there, on the cheap-ass notebooks they don't care.

You've only heard on ThinkPad having it because it's most easily encountered problem. HP, Dell, ASUS, Fujitsu, Toshiba, VAIO, ... they all have it in some models and not on others. But Dell users don't swear by their Inspirons or maintain LatitudeWiki.

White-box suppliers/resellers like Clevo or Walmart, or more recent entries like Microsoft, Huawei, Razer, Valve, etc might not have it across the lineup. Whitelist feature also invites people break root of trust; that might be an alternate concern for those brands too.

Which makes the argument that the FCC somehow requires this moot.

I don't know if Dell continued this in newer models, but I was pleasantly surprised by the versatility of the WWAN slot in my circa-2008 Precision workstation laptop.

No BIOS whitelist, antenna connectors that run up into the screen where the front bezel is plastic (allowing good reception), and plenty of room for an adapter. Grabbed a cheap adapter and AX210 card and stuck them in there and it all just works and so now it's equipped with BT and wifi better than is in my 13-years-newer X1 Nano.

How do you feel about the Intel management engine, which is a permanent backdoor with total hardware access which is fundamentally impossible to remove? Or AMD's equivalent, or NVIDIA's proprietary driver blobs, or the closed and un-auditable firmware on every computer ever?

Nobody is selling computers that are fully open. Even Framework uses a closed firmware.

In our modern capitalist hellscape, you sometimes have to settle for the least worst option. The BIOS whitelist on older thinkpads is completely trivial to defeat, and apart from that they are incredibly durable and repairable machines. The T530 came out in 2013, and has been my daily driver for near 10 years, after buying it used for $100. I'd say that kind of longevity is more than worth the effort of flipping some bits in a BIOS image.

If you want to draw hard lines like this, then you've ruled out absolutely every machine produced in the last 30 years. Nothing is fully open. You simply have zero options.

While YMMV, some smaller companies and manufacturers offer boards based on ARM or RISC-V cores. Consider checking out the MNT Reform - likely one of the closest computers that while a bit impractical, fills the openness criteria.

Modern ARM designs destined for computing are alo coming with management engine like features, just like Intel and AMD, plus other obscure silicone features and proprietary FW blobs, even more so than Intel and AMD, like DSPs, ISPs, etc.

If you want non-obscure HW you'll have to go back to pre-microcode days of processors roll out your own.

Everything's relative. Sure, the BIOS whitelist is a serious mark in the "bad" column. In the "good" column, my daily driver is a Frankenpad made from a T480 with the 7-row keyboard from a T25, the 500 nit screen and glass touchpad from an X1 Carbon gen 6, a 2TB SSD upgrade, a 32GB RAM upgrade (two slots! I could even have had 64) and a magnesium lid for kicks. There is no other laptop brand with this many options for slicing, dicing, and upgrading in this fashion.

Is this modularity mostly an incidental side effect of part reuse and corporate serviceability for Lenovo's benefit rather than ours? Sure. But hacking isn't always about what things were designed to do - it's about what they can do.

>>> my daily driver is a Frankenpad made from a T480 with the 7-row keyboard from a T25

you can't just say this without giving us more details... MOAR!

It's all documented here: https://www.xyte.ch/mods/t25-frankenpad/

Aside from sourcing the parts, the screen part was actually harder: this combination of screen, lid, and webcam is not officially supported, so the drilling and hacking I had to do for that was not documented. Unfortunately the foam tape I used to brace the screen in the correct left-right position seems to have slipped, as the screen is no longer properly centered... oh well!

Any advice on selecting a "good" AX210 card -- or perhaps avoiding a bad one? I understand that it may be a bit of a crapshoot, but I'd like to improve my odds of success if possible for my own T530.

(Alternatively, the AX200 cards from the usual sources have a lot less of a back-alley Shenzhen feeling than the AX210 cards I've looked at. Perhaps that's a safer option.)

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