My personal fight against the modern laptop
Вставка
- Опубліковано 21 січ 2017
- Hamish Coleman
linux.conf.au/schedule/present...
In this talk, I will take you through the tools and techniques
I used to reverse engineer the keyboard controller in my Thinkpad
laptop and re-flash it with custom firmware. This will cover how the
Thinkpad range of laptops have tried to secure their firmware from
unauthorised changes. Finally, I will present my ongoing work to
reverse engineer the protocol used between the BIOS and the vendor's
flash update tool (which included writing a custom virtual machine
to emulate a minimal laptop).
I was driven to start this project when I realised that the laptops
currently on sale just did not meet my requirements. Even the durable
Thinkpad laptops I have preferred in the past are being dumbed down.
Eventually, I will need a new laptop - and with the current offerings,
I just do not want anything I can purchase off the shelf. I knew
I was not going to be able to build my own laptop from scratch
(and having discounted all the current free/open laptop offerings)
so I started looking at what I could hack together.
To keep the project achievable, I reduced my laptop gripes as far
as I could and focused on just the keyboard - asking the question:
"Can I shoehorn an older keyboard in a modern laptop?" Eventually
answering it with "yes, sometimes."
It turned out to be easily possible to physically replace the
keyboard on any of the Thinkpads in the xx30 series with one from the
xx20 series. I was stalled with a half-working keyboard until early
2016 when Zmatt published how he unlocked his laptop. The firmware
changes needed were bundled up into a complete build system which
others have used to replicate the keyboard replacement. However,
with both these laptop series' being several years old now, I am
still looking at forward porting this to a newer laptop - which has
led me to research the hardware and firmware design there.
I will also take the audience through my current knowledge of how
the vendor's protocol to tell the BIOS to write a new image to
flash works. Now that it is possible to write new code for the
embedded controller and to install it and run it - I wanted to
know how secure this was (or wasn't) separate to simply "fixing"
the keyboard. I have written a custom virtualisation tool to host
the vendors "dosflash" program and capture the protocol it uses to
request that the BIOS write a new image to flash.
It is my hope that others will be inspired to look closer at their
hardware and to give them both some tools and the confidence that
it is possible to "fix" the way that consumer hardware works.
I miss the days when all Unix Sysadmins looked like this.
A classic Unix Beard.
_And rms prepareth the man in His image; in the image of rms He prepared him_
and he did return from his sojourn in the outback proclaiming "yea, i have wandered in the wilderness and in my solitude did i grokk the face of the firmware. and behold, i come unto you bearing the good news. for something is going to happen. something wonderful!"
What do they look like now ?
Fahim Zahir They aren't obese (some are) and take care of themselves (some don't).
@@IO9802 They look more professional, and are less professional. Their number increased, for most it is a job, less a passion. Means the average sysadmin is just a guy who got through college and is working a job. IT got cooperate. High in demand, not a niche.
The war on general purpose computing goes on.
Awesome guy, because of him i get to use X220 keyboard on my X230! That's a quite nice contribution to the Thinkpad community!
Just used your repo to remove the battery whitelist on my T430 a few days ago. Thanks for the work you've done!
I'm going that route next week.
please use allowlist instead
@@LANstorm. bait?
@@Jack-pc9sp no
@@LANstorm. cringe then
I thought all the long hair, beard UNIX sysadmins moved to Oregon to make goat cheese; it warms my heart that some of the old style dudes are still around. Long live emacs!
Blessings man, you're a game changer.
We are legions to love the power of TIME-PROOF Classic designs.
*Functionality and Ergonomics OVER silly Looks and dumb trade offs*
a billion thanks to you, i can charge and use my 20$ aftermarket t430 battery instead of paying 120$ to lenovo to buy their proprietary bs. You my friend is a great person.
It's great seeing this problem addressed. I bought new Asus laptops as and the staff complained about the keyboards, refused to give up their old Thinkpads, so now we have a problem finding a model of a brand that with is equivalent to the older Lenovo. The Asus laptops went back to vender.
my hero. *fingers eagerly click-clacking off my newly transplanted keyboard*. and prolly the most teenagered I've felt in a good ten years; my breath holding, the bios flashing, two beeps, air escaping. I am growing old, but I am typing as it's 1999. thank you, thank you.
This dude is the reason why I was able to put the best laptop keyboard to date in my X230T! Bless him.
Just installed a X220 keyboard in my X230 ! Patching the EC was easy, thanks to your hard work. Thank you very much!
Fascinating talk, thanks for uploading!
Excellent talk Hamish. I love that the hacker spirit is alive and well in all parts of the world. I've been exploring the Chromebook EC lately myself and trying to build upon the Samsung XE500C13 model which to me is quite good for my needs.
Old people like myself have many physical ergonomic stuff to help our keyboard use. My Dell XPS-15 has a factory made (3rd party) silicon-plastic overlay. It allows the LEDs under the screen to shine through. I've added other touches to highlight the keys as well.
The other option I use is a wireless keyboard. Often I need the numeric keypad, or standing away fro the notebook's keyboard.
Other hardware mods: USB for adding WIFI gadgets: drives, better wifi accessories, additional (powered) hubs of many kinds, etc.
Thanks! It was almost too easy to use your patches, now that you have done all the hard work ;)
What a fascinating talk. I know most folks don't like the new ThinkPad keyboards, but over the years I've grown to love them. I'm currently the proud owner of a secondhand T460s, and love it.
This is one of my favourite formats for a talk or a UA-cam series.... a nice autobiography of hack!
2018 and I am still holding on to my trusted X220 :-).
Time for an open source laptop. With a roadmap to assure keeping up with new developments. It saves so much time and frustration. The IBM PC was at least fully published. The RasPi is open source. Both designs were a kickstart for further developments. And fast!
You can use pi to make opensource laptop, but as soon as you want something more powerful with intel or amd CPU, you are out of luck. Intel Management Engine and the AMD alternative are closed source and are mandatory for the CPU to run. No one knows what they actually do (expect the manufacturers). So you are out of luck, unless you want to make your own CPU.
@@elukok , how about building an open source laptop using ARM processors? I'm not so knowledgeable on ARM processors, but I've seen some interesting videos about them.
@@edialbert8035 Google TERES by Olimex, it's exactly this.
Also check out the PineBook Pro
Their getting FreeBSD on it with full functionality too!
Thanks guys! I will check it out.
i use an old keyboard and mouse fed thru a ps to usb plug and find its much nicer to move the laptop where its nice to see and have your hands were they are comfortable
The new thinkpad keyboards are absolutely shitty. I am happy that more people are complaining about it. The classic thinkpad keyboard had nice ergonomic aspects. You can touch-type the function keys without looking down, because they are all grouped in four. The arrow keys are proper sized buttons (even the macbook has it wrong). There is a slight curvature on each key's surface that makes it easy for the finger to feel the borders. All of these are missing in the new keyboards. This chiclet design is the worst thing to happen for the thinkpads.
Have you actually looked at one of the new keyboards before complaining? I got a 2016 Thinkpad and have no idea what you're talking about.
The function keys are still grouped in four, the arrow keys are normal sized and I can easily feel the key's borders even without curvature.
did you locked at the old thinkboard keyboards? dedicated volumekeys, mute, mice, doubke sized ESC and DEL keys, easy to find without looking, page back and forth keys, music player keys ... all gone for very little reason ...
Tobias F. Bullshit. Mine still has keybindings for volume, mute, mic mute, page up & down. And yes, Esc and Del are still significantly bigger than the neighbouring keys.
Lenovo is listening to all the negative feedback and adding features back one by one. The initial T400 series did not had the function key grouping and that got added later. Hopefully sometime in future, we may get the original IBM style Thinkpad keyboards.
look at video above 5min21sec marker, these are the original 7 rows thinkpad keypads
I love crusty old laptops. They're the Honda Civics of the computer world: cheap, generally robust, blocky and ugly, easily fixable and upgradable.. Long gone are the days of socketed Intel mobile CPUs, but I still rock a Dell with one. Holding onto it as long as I possibly can
difference is that most any car will push highway speeds, but a crusty old ThinkPad just can't do the modern web.
@@redwillrise who told you that? just dont use Windows 10/11 and a T420 can do most anything.
@@zen66ten bruh the highest-end CPU available in a T420 was an i7-2620M, which is a dual core from literally over 10 years ago. In terms of single-core performance that puts it in the same class as mid-range smartphones, and it gets absolutely smoked by them in multi-core performance. And of course they have way more hardware acceleration for all kinds of modern tasks, meanwhile the iGPU of such an ancient i7 doesn't even support h.265 hardware decode. Hell, most T420s won't have an i7-2620M but maybe even an i5 dual core without any multithreading which would suck even harder. It will struggle with any kind of multitasking.
So you get a very slow, bulky laptop that's a decade old with poor battery life and old-ass wifi, but it might run acceptably if you use a deprecated and unsafe version of Windows? Doesn't sound great, does it?
Yeah, you can run Linux, but it will still be a shit device by modern standards. I'd much rather just have a Pinebook Pro or get a more modern refurbished Thinkpad.
@@redwillrise Sure you cant render video or edit on such a machine well, or at all; but it costs 100 dollars and it can be used for administration or for coding/development and it can absolutely do that just fine. Also it can work just as a home server sitting there 24/7 running your mailserver, dns, vpn and other shit, because unlike a modern cpu, it consumes pretty much no power.
Also to your argument that smartphones smoke it in performance, if you wanna do any creative content thats not taking pictures, any laptop or desktop is better. No sane person will try editing text or writing or really doing any meaningful work on a smartphone, no matter how fast the proccessing power. So yeah a thinkpad is just a cheap reliable work machine, which it is. Nobody sane claims its superior because of processing power lol
it's 2021 and i still use my t420s (with neutered IME) and t420 (completely overhauled with a 3rd gen i7, coreboot, a homebrew LFS-based linux 'distro', 1080p IPS, etc) on a daily basis. long live "real" thinkpads! yes, they may be about a decade old, but they do everything i need in a very snappy manner. of course, avoiding shit consumer OSes helps a lot there too...
just installed the x220 keyboard on my X230T. I guessed i am lucky too because i didn't notice the difference too.
this is why i still use X220 for my mobile laptop, T420 for my media center and W520 for my workstation. :)
Does the battery hold more than 5 hours?
Hopefully in (near) future there will be options to modernize your old Thinkpads with newer hardware. Would be nice to get less power consumptive cpu to my modded x230 and T430.
Yeah, the only thing i wish my thinkpads had is a more energy efficient cpu for all day use and a backlit version of the old style keyboard.
Just got a x200t can't wait to tinker with it :)
Thank you for your efforts
Inspiring, thank you.
YES! A man after my own heart!!! Almost no hardware, but no keyboard (ESPECIALLY) is EVER exactly how I want it to be!
THANK YOU so much for sharing all of this information, sir|
Over the years I've come up with different ways to customize, tweak, hack and "re-program" hardware to suit my needs.
Most of my keyboard desires are met by creating my own custom keyboard layouts (finding software capable of facilitating that was an ongoing challenge for many years). Some of my other requirements are more fundamental which are implemented at lower levels that vary depending on the OS. In Windows I swap keys in the registry.
But fundamentally, hardly any keyboards have enough total keys for me! So, I resort to using additional software that allows me to create my own faux "Fn" key 'layer' of functions/commands.
Of course, I always attempt to get a keyboard with extra buttons & multimedia keys. But that's not really an option for laptops. Another really fantastic solution is to get Japanese keyboards whenever possible/available.
What would I like to improve? There are several devices I'd rather have inside the laptop case, rather than acting as "dongles" hanging off USB cables
One selling point of the Pi laptop is the access to the Raspberry Pi "hat" 40-pin header. Another popular hardware device is called the "bus pirate".
2020 watching this from my X230 with X220 keyboard and 13.3-inch FHD screen
I am just about to attempt soldering the Nitrocaster FHD mod onto my x230 motherboard in a few hours. Hope I can check back here from my new FHD screen. :)
Coming back to this after the Framework laptop came out. Still not perfect, as I want a ortholinear keyboard with no space bar. But it is a step in the right direct. (Current solution is a yoga style laptop to get the keyboard out of the way and use my preferred keyboard like a desktop.
I wonder if a small batch keyboard that either framework or someone could make available could help. The keyboard are replaceable afaik but they just don't manufacture that layout.
Huh. Am I the only one that actually *likes* the newer non-trapezium-shaped keys? Maybe I'm just used to them, but I find my fingers keep getting stuck between the keys when it's those thick ones...
That why we need a RETRO ThinkPad!
We're getting one, but Lenovo is making even more profit from it, they should at least offer a 7 row keyboard
I wouldn't be surprised if the Anniversary Edition was made at a loss.
No doubt, the whole reason it's so damn expensive is because they know they aren't going to be selling many.
They aren't going to be selling many with $1800+ price tag, that's for sure.
Watching this on my 2007 Dell. Screw new! It's £30 for a processor and a bunch of RAM and £50 for a GPU to complete a system that can still run modern games and programs like a dream. Get your hands dusty!
watching this from my x220T
from my T420
x60 with libreboot
Here's a cookie
Just bought an X220. I'd also like the T version in the future, I love it!
T440P
I'm thinking of just buying an x220 motherboard and using it (along with a suitable AMD GPU) to build a small, thin emulation unit in an arcade cabinet. i5 2520M, Retroarch, "external" AMD GPU flashed to only output 15kHz resolutions to a CRT arcade monitor. I'm hoping to use coreboot to make a BIOS with a low enough resolution for it too.
Any opinions?
Well I didn't think people would be interested but maybe they will. I've got almost all I need, mobo, ram, ssd, docking station I'll be gutting for for ports. Just need to decide on a GPU and figure out a way to connect it without spending $75 on an adapter. I was hoping there'd be vias or pads somewhere to access all 16 pcie lanes but it seems not. Who knows if they'd even be active on the CPU?
I guess I could use a flex circuit bga1023 interposer, but I don't think such a thing exists. Not affordably anyway!
WE do want a video!
Why to start with laptop motherboard? Wouldn't some small factor desktop motherboard (possibly opensource out of the box if that exists) be more suitable for this?
Can't wait for the Pinebook to get more powerful. And grow a trackpoint.
It's 2020 and I'm still using X230.
lol get on my level, still using a thinkpad x60 in 2020. X230 is nothing! would love to upgrade to one of those...
The solution is IPS patches. Wich is basically a binary dif.
So in short your ideal laptop is: W520 w/ ivy bridge using coreboot. At least mine is.
Can you rebuild thinkpad p50 laptop battery?
I have a t430 and I swapped in a 2.7/3.7ghz quad core from aliexpress for like $23.
battery and power management still be an issue for linux distro.
Yeah, though its getting better, might be worth trying auto-cpufreq if you're still using Linux, it does a much better job controlling the cpu frequency and thus saving battery, my laptop now just idles at 800mhz most of the time.
Watching this from my X240
Purism is not currently shipping a blob-free laptop.
What do you mean by a blob?
The newest regular laptop at least to my knowledge that is possible to run without any blobs is Thinkpad X200, but you need to physically connect to some of the chips and rewrite them using external tools. The one year older X60 is possible to run without blobs and without taking it apart, you can get rid of them from the system. Probably the only two regular laptops without blobs. After the X200, the intel started using ME, bad news for open source.
I think the hp dev one fits the requirements 3:50
an arduino can be programmed as a usb device like a keyboard.. and you can make your own keyboard ..case solved ?
reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards thank me later :D There are dozens of us building in similar fashion
As he said, he would also like to see what else does the embedded controller do. If there are no backdoors and stuff like that. If you own things, you should also know what code they run. Hate these practices of hiding the code and functionality.
deskthority.net thank me later. There are people with actual knowledge about hardware programming, pcb design, software ncro etc. /r/mk is a gigantic ciclejerk where kiddos brag about too expensive artisan caps.
Stay away from there if you actually wan't to programm something.
i like old thinkpads and old fujitsus i use arch btw
Man, because of you i can use T420 keyboard on my T430. Thanks Hamish!
X220 ftw 🙌
proud owner of a new-to-me X220. Just wondering how long I can keep it... wittamore.com/chercher.php?query=X220
@@philipwittamore cool, make sure u upgrade the panel to IPS. The hd panel upgrade is a bit more involved! I sold mine when I needed a bit more photo editing juice and higher screen res but for linux I reckon you could use for another 5 years. Was a lovely machine, enjoy 👍
why don't you take the red pill, join Lenovo and fight this deterioration from the inside?
put the good keyboard back again, make the battery removable again, make lenovo great again!
Not as simple as that
@@BenyaminLimanto it's simple.
They just pander to fucking normies and aiming for profit over good products nowadays. Imagine something like the x220 but with i9 or adm ryzen 5 and gpus. Would be insane.
@@PsycosisIncarnated That's what I mean... they think about profit, copy cat of apple of all bad side of apple.. That's why it's complicated, greed and profit make people do things that they don't want to do.
"high current voltage" XD
current times voltage is power, so it makes sense ;-)
Why did he bother with a X230 when he could have just gone with an i7 X220? The X230 is just as out of production as the X220, the problem is with the current X270 model's keyboard, which the upcoming X280 is likely going to continue to emulate.
am I the only one who always heard "reddit" instead of "Radare"
"reddit is powerful" "reddit is complicated" "reddit didn't fix it"
me too lol
"hte" stands for hex terminal editor.. isn't that obvious?
Its tru i hate change something if is great and no errors u can still upgrade old model keyboard change buttons to mechanical or use hub USB3.1 not old 2.0 but i hate if someone change US internatonal standard 104 buttons for new shity function like led or media buttons and this work only on 1 OS like windows and not work on linux without special config or script.
I think I'm the only one here who wants a really big and powerful laptop. Mainly cause I am at home most of the time I use my laptop and it pretty much stays in the same place a lot.
Then buy a desktop and a small portable notebook to use only when going somewhere. Thats what i do.
thanks for this video, amazing! Lenovo: directly into your face!
2021 rocking X200 as Main and only machine lol
Did you libreboot it? I wanna buy one even while I have two x220
@@ericyip947 Windows 7 Gang member here
well if you look at apple laptops then sure... There are a lot of great PCs with a lot of ports, even some with mecanical keyboards
Could we please get subtitles?
Sagiri turn on closed captioning
Auto generated subtitles are kind of garbage.
"High current voltage"
You can just say "high power" at that point
i plug an old IBM Model M into the laptop and it is so much better.
Based
mnt reform?
Watching this on a x230 Lenovo. Love the keyboard.
Fucking legend.
i don't like how 15 inch laptops nowadays have all this unused space, look at that ugly macbook pro with that tiny ass keyboard!
Disk drive is gone? ok. the numpad was removed? uh oh. Super ultra thin shallow keyboard? no, no.
And now it is normal to have the damn thing bend like floppy cocks when you move it around because they make it so thin!
For ThinkPads it's actually the other way around; x5xx had no numpad before, now they do, and now people complain about the keyboard not being centred...
When the cat is nothing to do, he lick his bolls.
Where can I buy a full free laptop with no blobs no nothing, just me , 0 blobs , GNU/Linux like parábola Linux , good keyboard , etc ?????? Is imposible !
X200 T500
The x200, T400, T500 and W500 core 2 duo laptops are the last thinkpads that you can completely disable or remove the intel management engine, The later i3, i5 and i7 cpus can have the management engine only partially disabled.
You will probably have to coreboot or Libreboot it yourself though or pay someone else to do it and also install Linux.
The older models like the T60 and T61 are also a good choice but will be a bit less powerful.
I highly doubt you will find one for sale with all that already done to it though.
Companies became so stupid with making such trivial changes harder and harder...
While one of the things I say is "never go to a lot of trouble to inconvenience your customers" the design choices that lead to the high level of effort required to do things like change the keyboards are largely the result of the need to make computers resistant to attacks that are ever more sophisticated.
There are organizations out there that have everything they need to write their own firmware flashing tool. If those organizations can build that flashing tool into some malware, and if they can get that malware onto your computer, they can own your computer so thoroughly that you cannot possibly take it back without tools that are at a similar level of sophistication. The increasing use of cryptographic signatures with support in hardware, and using other features of the hardware to protect the keys or even make it difficult to look at the firmware of that microcontroller is all intended to defend against such sophisticated attacks.
One thing that the people who say"we need to have a computer that we can easily modify" have to keep in mind is that if you can easily modify it, then so can other people, and those other people may not be nice and trustworthy. I don't know the answer, myself, but I can at least recognize a hard problem when I see one.
Firmware should be free software.
I don't know what this means, it's interesting though.
./trim_beard
permission denied
I really don't understand why so many IT specialists like the thinkpads so much. I'd really hate to use a laptop where theres no control key on the lower left. No other manufacturer does that to my knowledge.
option in bios to swap it if you dont like it.
can you also swap out the keys?
no but i dont know about you but i dont look at the mod keys when i use them. For
It's a lot more ergonomic. You are using ctrl much more often than fn key. It's place on thinkpad fits more to an "ordinary" hand. You can just use all the shortcuts without having to stretch your fingers too much like when using a more "standardised" layout. It takes a few minutes to learn it but in the end you won't regret at all. It's all about ergonomics. Ctrl in the lower left corner does not meet the same purpose.
It's literally just switched with the Fn key. You can still easily reach it with your pinky.
who the fuck encrypts the firmware of a battery and keyboard
Anyone who has any interest in providing a computer system that can't be easily owned by a bad actor.
Well, to me the case for the battery is not clear, but like I put in the other comment, if it was easy for Mr. Coleman to update the firmware, then it would be easy for a bad actor, even a not particularly well-heeled bad actor, to just buy the toolkit he needs to update the firmware from Intel, and then he can own every laptop that uses that firmware, assuming he can get the owner to run some malware that's capable of using that toolkit.
This is the reason that we cryptographically sign the firmware I produce at my day job.
As long as "Better" is possible, being "good enough" is NOT enough. Hardware and computers in general have been downgraded and DUMBED down to an insane degree during the last decade. If it wouldn't be so sad it would be laughable. When ever i see modern PCs and Laptops i see nothing but thin, useless, overpriced throw-away crap that won't let you do ANYTHING with it other than just being a passive user / consumer.
this should be titled "my fights with modern thinkpad keyboards"
runs linux is actually too much objective, but hey it's 2017, the other things already exist!
new thinkpad keyboards suck, they are trying to make them look like a MacBook
Nostalgia is the problem, not the keyboards you boomers.
just get a mac , bin windows and ibm
You realise you are telling a freakin Linux conference of all places to bin windows right? Thats like their whole thing.
And no one wants to downgrade to a mac.
Its pretty pathetic what one person wants to go through for all this. He must be in a group of .0000000001 percent. Lenovo must be doing something right if they hadnt gone back to whatever Hamish is talking about.
He isn't alone. The old 7-row scissor Thinkpad keyboard is ergonomically nice. There was a lot of blowback to the chiclet key move by Lenovo but fans of Macbooks installing OS X for a "Hackintosh" sometimes like them.
Nitrocaster was/is also involved in this project which he is famous for doing modifications for these laptops with getting higher resolution displays in. Lenovo doesn't make custom Thinkpads like IBM used to when IBM had the reins.
Oh come on
Things don't last for ever
Either you can embrace the change or be stuck with the old
Simple as that.
Paramesh Subramoni id rather be stuck in 1992. Or at least be stuck in some old date.
Thats a bad mindset, just because something is changed or new it doesn't automatically make it good or better.