I was adding RSS feeds and saw that Libreboot’s 26.01 release had added a new Thinkpad - the T580. It’s larger, thicker, feels more solid - and most importantly - has a tenkey. Yes, I bought a new laptop for the tenkey. I managed to find one on Ebay for about $220 and set to work.
Really, it’s much the same as the T480 flashing process (the Libreboot website links to the T480 page), only this time I had an understanding of what the steps were. The biggest difference on this model was that I decided to flash the Thunderbolt firmware as well, as I couldn’t determine with any level of confidence if I was or was not affected by the bug they mention. I also had trouble finding the flash chips, and realized the one I was looking at was the Thunderbolt chip. I managed to find both, but the documentation lacks pictures. (The Thunderbolt chip is right next to the Thunderbolt ports, and slightly thinner. The main flash is towards the center of the board.)
I did also make a list of steps prior to starting, which helped a lot. I could keep a note of where I was in the process, and resume after getting sidetracked. (Again, the most difficult part was fighting with my machines to get dependencies working for the build tools. I spent a good half hour updating my raspberry pi, and it was also having boot issues to the point where I was waiting 5-10 minutes between reboots and hoping systemd didn’t hang.)
For future me, the Thunderbolt flashing process is as follows:
- Disable Thunderbolt Assist in the stock BIOS
- Download build repository, install/update build deps, and make the Thunderbolt binary with
mk -d coreboot t580_vfsp_16mb - Disassemble the T580, unplug internal battery and CMOS battery
- Dump the flash, twice, verify checksums match
- Erase the flash (
-Eflag) - Create a 1M
null.binfile withdd if=/dev/zero of=null.bin bs=1M count=1, then verify withhexdump - Flash
null.binto the Thunderbolt chip - Remove the clip, reassemble enough to power on, power on until you see the Lenovo logo
- Turn off and disassemble again, reattach the clip
- Flash
tb.binto the chip - Reassemble, turn back on and verify it still displays the Lenovo logo
Once this was completed, I went on to flash the normal way and everything went just fine.
I’m not sure if I will stick to Artix or just move to a distribution (like Mint) where I don’t have to think about anything - at least in comparison to my minimal Artix where if I want certain functionality like a second monitor I have to install stuff and/or script it. I haven’t felt up to that task lately, and I’m far less picky about my setup - I’m sure I could grab the main things I like such as the dmenu-style launcher and hotkey daemon and leave the rest. Not sure yet. I wonder if any desktop environments come with a tiling window manager…
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