Mia :Green:
moving back to 1vyrain bios, coreboot is cool and all but I dont think its really worth it
1
TheIronFox(MOVED)

@Mia I’m sat here trying to figure it out but what exactly does 1vyrain do? like why is a jailbreak necessary? is it enterprise lockdown type stuff for the xx30 machines?

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Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox is just lets you flash a custom bios rom without an external flasher
1
Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox obv levono doesnt want that but they left some flaws in the old firmwares and its possible to downgrade and abuse those flaws to gain write access to the bios region to flash something like coreboot, or typically a modified bios

mostly to bypass the wwan/wlan card whitelist
1
Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox calling it a jailbreak is a stretch but its not my code
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TheIronFox(MOVED)

@Mia hmmm interesting. now that you point it out, it seems obvs that there would be something akin to bootloader unlocking to flash a bios. just never thought about it before. thanks! :)

1
Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox all chromebooks can be internally flashed but most other stuff is externally flashed, certain thinkpads can be messed for internal flashing, but other brands aren't really messed with since nothing like coreboot/libreboot is compatible, and you'd prob want to use an external programmer to develop for a new platform, if they even have a bios chip that can be written to
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TheIronFox(MOVED)

@Mia fuck google but chromebooks continue to be neat lol

i guess i figured a coreboot flash would be similar to a bios update. is that a separate process? or is there some sort of digital signature or something involved with manufacturer provided files?

sorry for 20 questions lol just trying to wrap my head around it and don’t have access to hardware to try it myself

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Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox I imagine its either a digital signature or it uses a different region, I honestly don't know for sure, this is my first time messing with this, all the other thinkpads I've had needed to be externally flashed, and previously I wanted to go with libreboot which needs the full 12M of the flash chip(s) where 1vyrain only exposes the 4M of the bios region
0
Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox its a pretty deep rabbit hole, at least on the chromebook side, you can find some resources here if you're interested https://mrchromebox.tech
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Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox older chromebooks had a literal screw you had to remove to enable write access to the firmware, newer ones do it all in software, by removing the battery it disables the CR50 and allows you to disable write protection

chromebooks very rarely if ever need firmware updates iirc but google officially supports using a different bootloader, some devices even come with seabios already installed, it just has to be enabled and the you can chainload to it with a key combo (after switching to dev mode)
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Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox I only really know all this from being poor growing up and stuck with second hand chromebooks since they're sold in bulk lots for really cheap (I had 3 siblings so if I got a laptop they all did)
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TheIronFox(MOVED)

@Mia hey, gotta do what you gotta do. we’d all love to compute with multi-thousand dollar machines but if it gets the job done then good enough for me

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Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox back then crostini/linux support didn't exist and the only way do something other than use chrome was to use dev mode with something like chromebrew or https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton (which is long dead now)

and even when crostini/linux support first came out it was on a limited set of intel devices since it used the virtualization thingy
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Mia :Green:
@TheIronFox back then there was an extension that could be used to create an xorg server for use of xorg

but that kinda died
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