FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
81% Positive
Analyzed from 2050 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#still#coreboot#reverse#code#works#copyright#original#https#llm#firmware
Discussion (50 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The board arrived from Shenzhen after a month or so. I then had to manually fit (including drilling away some parts) the X60 LCD into the X61 chassis, which was extremely stressful. But in the end it all worked out perfectly. This X62 has been my private machine for 8 years now, and I always travel with it. The display still works perfectly, the 32 GB RAM are still more than enough, and it is still very easy to get X61 replacement batteries on Amazon. But the best thing is the form factor; this thing is just so neat and small and practical. Also the quality of the chassis is incredible. Apart from many, many scratches on the lid, it is still in flawless condition.
[0] https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/
I upgraded the screen to the 1400x1050 with a new display panel from china, but I had to cut the front screen protector and remove the "oil". It seems a little bit darker without that liquid inside and dust particles entered in that space. I couldn't find any LCD upgrade for the CCFL lamp at that time and now I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
I'd love to see a working coreboot for X60/61 Tablets that can still boot DOS and WinXP.
I really wish that there was an updated ThinkPad which supported the current generation of styluses (was looking at an x230T until I got my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 and Staedtler Noris Digital Stylus).
I wish it could go up to 32GB though. And the i7 in there shows its age. But it's still usable with modern software!
Best of all he even published on Github the result so that, hopefully, others benefit from his effort without even having to do it again.
When I was in college I had an ARM Chromebook which didn't have the Wacom driver, so I wound up trying to use the then-new Chrome USB APIs to make myself a tablet driver in a Chrome extension. This was long before LLM coding was a thing, but thanks to the Linux wacom.ko it wasn't really an obstacle.
The biggest problem I had was that while I was decoding digitizer inputs just fine I had nowhere to put them. I tried making a simple painting app in JS and it worked but without having native cursor movement it was just too jank and I gave up.
I eventually uploaded the code for posterity sake. I doubt it works at all anymore, even with the specific tablet it was hard-coded for. But it's still online, anyhow.
https://github.com/jchv/crwacom
Quite a different message than yours.
My point was to share a related anecdote on using LLM to making seemingly unusable hardware usable again, which seems feasible (hence sharing the anecdote to confirm from another source) and IMHO a positive use case, while so many others are not necessarily so.
But I would really like to see this trend take off, so we can take back control over smart devices and see more FOSS firmware pushed out to various devices (OpenWRT etc).
What a mixed blessing it is now that theoretically, especially as LLMs increase in competence, an idiot like me might actually be able to port Coreboot to an unsupported platform with some LLM-assisted reverse engineering. I mean, it's probably still a long shot without as much arcane knowledge as you gain from working in stuff like this professionally, but at this point it's probably the best shot I have since I probably won't find myself in such a scenario.
I guess I should try to find time to revisit a reverse engineering project that I haven't had time to dig deep into... It does feel like a shame that this way I'll never really improve my skills related to reversing, though.
The more straight forward (and 64 bit) candidate would be Slackware 15.0 with a few of Alien Bob's slackbuilds.
But, of course, the retro computing approach mentioned by another poster would look really nice and be a conversation piece.
Port any drivers you need with AI.
Only half-serious...
Win2000 or WinXP would be a better choice due to numerous reasons though. Win2K with an SSD is absolutely going to fly on that thing.
...yes we are? After all, that's how the whole IBM PC-compatible industry started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t...
AFAIK the later Thinkpads including this one uses a Phoenix BIOS, so it's amusing to see the circularity of how things turned out; and continuing on that path, Phoenix sold its BIOS business to Lenovo a little earlier this year.
Even the clean-room isolation that Phoenix went through isn't legally required, it just makes nuisance lawsuits more difficult. BSD prevailed over UNIX System Laboratories, in their reimplementation of Unix, despite having directly worked with the source code.
It turns out that's not exactly the case! See, e.g., Goldstein v. California, 412 U.S. 546 (1973). Before 1978, state (often common law) copyright used to cover a lot of pre-publication works, and until 2018 (when the federal law was amended) state copyright law covered pre-1972 sound recordings, and state copyright still covers obscure things like post-mortem moral rights in visual art or rights to "unfixed" works. See 1 Nimmer on Copyright §§ A.02 & 2.02. Other forms of intellectual property (trade secrets, rights of publicity) remain mostly creatures of state law, and some states also have trademark systems.
Coreboot is debatable for this, it's fine in the sense that nobody is going to come after you for it, but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement, which is fundamentally different to the Phoenix BIOS clone, and not in a good way.
But as I said, nobody is going to come after you for it so...
Interesting legal question: if Claude reverse engineers the original and writes a spec, and ChatGPT implements the spec without seeing the original, is that a clean-room implementation? Asking for a friend with a trillion parameters
On my todo, i still have the pet project to make a simple libusb c project to control its gpios. The documentation id not very clear, and implémentations scarce. Now with LLMs i could make some progress.
Sad that free BIOSes are so far behind modern hardware, but this is very necessary work.
[The following question is only valid if you meant "free" as in "GPL/BSD"]
Is it completely clear that LLM code is considered "clean room" and won't leak copyrighted code?
afaik all modern x86 chromebooks ship with coreboot based firmware
these machines are amazing, but sadly they're showing signs of age these days. mine's already kinda unusable due to dim CCFL backlight and fan grinding noise.
I never knew about SerialICE prior to reading this article, or that it could forward IO/MMIO to actual hardware (i.e., act as a proxy)... In the past I was curious if a debugging tool like that could exist, and apparently, yes it can!
Anyway, great article!
Related:
https://www.serialice.com/index.html
https://github.com/coreboot/serialice