Lenovo T420 Ivy Bridge Support - i7-3540M

[DeathBringer]

i have an T420 QM67 with 2520M (HD3000) 988B G2 Socket Sandy Bridge, 

i try to upgrade for  i5 3210M (HD4000) ivy Bridge 988B G2 Socket 

but it doesnt work...

You can't boot  i5-3210M on QM67 chipset. It's hardware incompatibility.

[nando4]

There is a Coreboot T420 bios with Ivy Bridge support. Now just need to massage the necessary changes into the Lenovo BIOS.

See  http://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/t420.

[Avexrion]

Excellent, this is just the evidence I was looking for.

Yeah, now if a stock Lenovo BIOS was updated with the necessary changes and microcode, that would be just what I was after.

Time to look into hardware flashers.

[Floris]

Beside of demonstrating that t420 hardware could work with an ivy bridge cpu, are coreboot patches useful to achieve the same result with original bios?
Has coreboot an enough similar structure to allow to use that ( or very similar ) code in the bios, or at least could it be taken as example of which modifications the original bios needs?

[Floris]

In the german forum an user has uploaded a working bios with upgraded intel vbios module ( from the original 2089 version to 2170 ).
According to intel changelog, in version 2113 a new feature was added to vbios:

Cross compatibility feature Implemented with single VBIOS binary to support Both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge platforms with a "chipset selection" option in BMP

Does that mean that the vbios will recognize IVB hardware, or that is a feature that could be enabled with some modifications?
If it' s something related to the problem mentioned in the page of coreboot patch that enable IVB support:

Sandy and Ivy Bridge processors use the same socket,
and a mainboard with the socket can support both types
of CPUs. However, they use different native graphics init
code and cause a crashing if running the wrong code.
So it needs a detecting, then selects the right code to run.

this could be the key feature in order to have IVB cpus working on t420 also with an original bios mod. Am I wrong?

[Cypriot]

In the german forum an user has uploaded a working bios with upgraded intel vbios module ( from the original 2089 version to 2170 ).
According to intel changelog, in version 2113 a new feature was added to vbios:

Cross compatibility feature Implemented with single VBIOS binary to support Both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge platforms with a "chipset selection" option in BMP

Does that mean that the vbios will recognize IVB hardware, or that is a feature that could be enabled with some modifications?
If it' s something related to the problem mentioned in the page of coreboot patch that enable IVB support:

Sandy and Ivy Bridge processors use the same socket,
and a mainboard with the socket can support both types
of CPUs. However, they use different native graphics init
code and cause a crashing if running the wrong code.
So it needs a detecting, then selects the right code to run.

this could be the key feature in order to have IVB cpus working on t420 also with an original bios mod. Am I wrong?

If there is a bios setting to manually select the IVY bridge microcode (CPU and GPU) then I would think this switch from Sandy bridge is possible. The only difference is microcode support and nothing else.

[DeathBringer]

Updating microcode doesn't add a support of Ivy Bridge core to this chipset. There are many other differences.

[Cypriot]

Hello
I am not a guru on this, I am just saying my opinion.
Using this firmware Lenovo_ThinkPad_T420_83ET76WW-83uj28us_NWL_LEN21_ADV_RAM_Speedo_AES_vBios-2170 which has both IVY bridge support and 1600/1866 DDR3 frequency support, but also if one hacks this excellent bios by adding additional microcode support for both GPU and CPU for intel hd 4000 and IVY bridge in the bios as selectable options I don't think there is anything else needed. because there is no chip to automatically recognize the CPU type (sandy bridge or Ivy bridge) or the Graphics card (intel hd 3000 or intel hd 4000) these options have to be enabled in the bios manually. Thus 2 entries have to be added in the bios. One for graphics card selection (intel hd 3000 or intel hd 4000) and one for CPU microcode (2nd gen or 3rd gen)
The CPU is otherwise the same. There are already some ivy bridge CPUs supported by QM67 like Intel® Core™ i5-3610ME, and this proves my point.
Hope a solution is found.

Regards

[Omicron]

Hey, hate to bump this older topic, but has anyone succeeded taking a T420 BIOS and making these changes to allow Ivy Bridge processors to be used with it? The only real news I have heard was in a similar "thinkpad-forum.de" thread, and they seemed to have halted with the idea.

They also acknowledge that the main things needed would be adding in the GPU switch statement, and the microcodes. Coreboot also seems to work as well, but it seems needlessly complex and I'd prefer the original BIOS (Ivy Bridge support in the current 1.48 one.)

[Floris]

Today I had a look to t420 original/modded ( vbios 2170) bios, and t430 original bios.
First of all I discovered, according to intel bmp, that in modded vbios IVB chipset is selected. Nevertheless that bios works with SNB cpu, not with IVB. After a little investigation, i found some info about intel graphic driver that seems to explain why.
For the uefi boot mode, DXE core loads GOP policy driver, then it locates and loads video bios table into memory, then gop driver start with those settings.
So I started to look in bios for the policy module, looking specifically for the $vbt string, and that' s what I' ve found:
In t420 ( SNB) sainitdxe module has one $vbt reference, in t430 ( SNB & IVB compatible ) two, also t430 has just before ivbgop and snbgop modules, two very similar modules with the $vbt string and that differs for chipset code ( 18-snb,20-ivb ). My idea is that two modules are the actual chipset setting loaded by gopdrivers, so in order to enable IVB on t420 we' ve to find video bios table module in bios and try to work on it.