The goal of that blog post is not to sell you something.
This can be confusing on HN, I know.
amiga-workbench 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this can help with the extremely irritating bug (intentional?) on the X270 where if you give it a third party 9-cell battery, it will raise CPU_PROCHOT all the damn time, and my processor would drop to below 1Ghz clock speeds.
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.
gritzko 1 hours ago [-]
I was the happy owner of ThinkPad X1 Extreme g1. It had that bug out of the box, new original battery. Once it thermal throttles, it never goes back to full GHz. It throttled pretty soon, cause big CPU small chassis. Yes, I had a script like that.
It is still somewhere on a shelf, so maybe its day will come again.
muniter 6 hours ago [-]
Nice to finally know what was happening to my x270 after so many years. Well good thing it doesn't happen when connected to power nowadays is my home server
inamberclad 4 hours ago [-]
Oh almost certainly. PROCHOT is programmable.
65a 6 hours ago [-]
Possibly. Usually this is handled by the embedded controller, and not sure if that was reversed or not. You may be able to tristate the GPIO line that tells the CPU that a pin means PROCHOT, which would allow you to ignore the ECs attempts to do this.
nxobject 6 hours ago [-]
Do you think it could also be due to an ACPI table?
amiga-workbench 6 hours ago [-]
Its possible. I know from the BIOS revision changelogs that the T470 did get a patch to fix this, but the X270 never did.
rasz 4 hours ago [-]
Thinkpads do same thing when detecting 65W supply instead of 90W despite you only need 90W if running full tilt while charging.
BobbyTables2 6 hours ago [-]
How did OP debug this without a serial port?
I’ve messed around with porting coreboot on two desktop platforms but always had the benefit of a HW serial port…
katdork 5 hours ago [-]
because the x280 and x270 are similar enough I didn't need to try very hard to get it to post or boot a live USB to further investigate (effectively acting as a decent template for me to work off of)
The console viewing itself was provided by `cbmem -1`, which I could run via a NixOS live USB with nixpkgs#coreboot-utils
65a 6 hours ago [-]
You can sometimes find the serial lines if you are careful. Otherwise you can use the flashrom to store the output, and read it back out after each failure. It is much easier to just poke around and find the serial if you can, either from schematics (it seems the author has these) or by hand with a lot of patience or board scrying.
znpy 28 minutes ago [-]
I always wondered, what is the practical advantage of running coreboot on my laptop?
warangal 3 hours ago [-]
pretty cool work!
Though it leaves me wondering if coreboot/bios code can directly interface with thermal-management and battery controller , shouldn't it be feasible to improve upon battery life by exposing some interface to OS, like apple laptops ?
3 hours ago [-]
reductum 6 hours ago [-]
Atom feed is malformed :(
katdork 5 hours ago [-]
sorry, I'll look into it
periodjet 6 hours ago [-]
This is absurdly trans-coded.
Ah, todsacerdoti. ;)
katdork 5 hours ago [-]
I am a trans woman, yes :o
(the user who posted my blog post is not me :p)
mattv8 7 hours ago [-]
What I would give for a wife that would enjoy tinkering with me.
notpushkin 6 hours ago [-]
Seek and thou shalt find. Just don’t be too pushy on the romantic side of things.
mattv8 6 hours ago [-]
Too late for me then I suppose, I'm married with two kids.
esseph 3 hours ago [-]
This gave me a good chuckle :)
brcmthrowaway 8 hours ago [-]
Was AI Used?
katdork 5 hours ago [-]
Hi! As the author, no! I take a hard line stance against AI use myself. It's just not for me.
vips7L 3 hours ago [-]
Respect.
wetpaws 7 hours ago [-]
Does it matter?
uhfraid 3 hours ago [-]
on HN in 2026, I’d say it’s never mattered more lol
vips7L 3 hours ago [-]
HN? You mean Molt News?
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
alt187 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 09:43:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Why though? Not a single reason mentioned in post about why would it be better than whatever stock BIOS the laptop is shipped with.
Reading https://libreboot.org/#why-use-libreboot might provide further enlightenment.
This can be confusing on HN, I know.
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.
It is still somewhere on a shelf, so maybe its day will come again.
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
Ah, todsacerdoti. ;)
(the user who posted my blog post is not me :p)