(UEFI) Dell XPS 15z L511z modded BIOS - and HOWTO

[kasar]

hey all, I has been a little inactive at this topic, but I am planing to return to the bios modding stuff at least a little more, however I feel now a little lost again

I am interested on unlocking the overclocking menus at the L502X.


well, also on a p370em laptop my brother just bought.

the bios is very limited on the laptop.

however, i checked the advanced module, and it have a lot of stuff relating to overclocking, hyperthreading and other posible locked options, it reminded a similar situation I found with my L502X

this is a picture of the original bios advanced menu




I also attached the original advanced setup module.

I searched for the 0A 82 45 8A hex on it.

but just saw two 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 45 0A wich were already 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 45 0A

tried change it to 00 but had no effect at all when flashing the modified bios, the same menus were there with aparently no differences.

If posible, I would like to know more about the whole proccess of dissasembly the module.

wich IDA version and wich steps exactly to get a proper disasembled file and get in the propper way to find what is needed to be changed ^^

[Brabbelbla]

Interested as well. Also like to know how exactly the hexadecimal bytes to change in the modules was established, and what source was used. EFI_IFR seems to have many possibilities, and I haven't found a good source to clarify things.

In our (at least my L702X, probably also your) BIOS'es there are still some text strings in PlatformSetupAdvancedDxe that are not visible when in that screen, most notably strings related to RAID. Of course that might be because RAID was disabled or whatever (L702X does have two identical HDD's), but there is also a string called 'Boot priority' to switch between UEFI first and legacy first. This entry also is invisible in the actual advanced screen (nor to find under boot settings, where it should be), and can't depend on some hardware feature. So there might be more to unlock, but I don't really have an idea where to start.

So, any thoughts?

[kasar]

@Brabbelbla

we unlocked many options at the l702x
here you can DL it and watch the unlocked menus if you didnt tested it already.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps...os-18.html

about the raid features, maybe other modules would be needed to be modded.

I remember I tried something relating raid for l702x users, but didnt had luck on it.

[Brabbelbla]

I know you have , and that's awesome. But when you go back in this thread you may find some posts of me, as I followed the instructions myself for editing the modules and succesfully flashed my own modified BIOS. My point is that even with those unlocked modules there still are quite some text strings in PlatformSetupAdvancedDxe that are not visible in the advanced menu, or their relevant submenus, or even whole submenus not being displayed. Many strings related to RAID, but also as an example of something most probably not hardware-dependent way: a string for an option to switch the boot priority (4D6D), a whole menu on wireless settings (284E) and a whole bunch of other things.

So I don't know what these text string would be. Text strings with no further use in the module? Seems strange to me. I'm not really familiar with EFI or IFR structures, but IFR seems to have many more options than plain suppress. There also are many conditional statements possible with IFR, if I read correctly from for instance the PhoenixWiki. Decompiling the module would be interesting. If possible. I used to have some copy of IDA, but I deleted it. Grr.

By the way, I'm not sure if this is the right place for it, but anyway: the Lenovo W520 supports RAID, and booting from it in both Legacy and UEFI mode and uses SecureCore Tiano as well. Not sure if it's the same version.

[kasar]

well, me and my bad memory

yeah, the same thing goes for the L502X, I noticed a lot of strings related to overclocking at the PlatformSetupAdvancedDxe, however jkbuha said they are not unlockeable by hex editing the file I think.
not sure if we have to mess with ME firmware, EC or idk, I managed to unlock BCLK overclocking by modding the ME firmware. now it can be overclocked using apps like intel XTU, but nothing at the bios sadly.

yeah, looking for aditional conditional statements would be interesting, however I am a bit lost while dissasembling the modules.

my main task here was kinda a lot of blind tricks, some hardware tweaks and a lot of testing, but the main brains here were jkbuha and timewalker

[jkbuha]

Hey guys - good to see everyone back here (most of us after finishing our exams =D)

First things first - we have *all* been main brains here. Looking back through all the pages in this topic you can easily where each one of us became a hero and helped the rest of us to continue working on our project. I think this should really serve as a reminder of all the hard work we have achieved together as a team - that it wouldn't have been possible without the contribution of everyone in this topic.

As things stand there are a few secrets that are left to unlock on our 1st & 2nd gen Dell SB machines, and this is all the more important given some of us may be upgrading to more recent kit in the near future, that we need to make sure we learn all that is possible from this current setup and take the lessons we've learnt to other hardware as well.

Amongst these 'hard to get' secrets we still have the following:

1) Overclocking - limited success with BCLK (kasar) and FSB (jkbuha), there clearly should be more options available to us.
2) Undervolting - so far not possible, most likely restricted to the lack of ME firmware accessibility
3) ME modding - possibly the most important of the lot, so far only done via hardware and exclusive to kasar

What else? C'mon let's give us a great project to work on whilst we're not at the beach

cheers
jkbuha

[kasar]

hey jkbuha, nice to see you again

thanks for your comments ^^


well relating the pending projects, I would like to focus on unlocking the other menus from the advanced settings module in bios setup

you said something about they cant be unlocked via hex editing in that module. but it can may be unlocked with ME firmware editing.

since I am equiped with chip sockets, 4 aditional chips for faster testing, and a LPT homemade programmer, I can do the more risky tests, however, I dont have sockets on the EC chip, so I cant test so much in there, have no backup or hardware way to access that yet.

well, things it would be interesting to do:

* unlocking other menus
* enable the integrated uefi shell hotkey while turning on the machine, I heard it was something like F10
* getting your overclock working without the need of clover and make it through ME or bios, or at least mod something to be able to OC from software from windows
* get fan control, I noticed prema made a FN + 9 hotkey on their bios mod wich make the fan spin at 100%, if you hit the key combination again, it comes back to normal speed, that will be interesting to OC or keep the machine cool.
* enable Raid support for machines like L702X wich can have two internal hdds without need to use hdd caddys for the optical drive.
* include a bios module to get more XTU software functionalities working, many of the advanced gamming laptops have that module by default, and since our lappys have the HM67 chipset, wich support overclocking, it would be interesting to unlock its posibilities
* check if there is a way to make a hybrid me7 and me8 firmware and add support for ivy proccesors on our sandy lappys

[speeed]

Hi guys, any chance to hack bios for fujitsu ah531 for option to overclock processor? am not expert not even close

[TimeWalker]

Hi guys, any chance to hack bios for fujitsu ah531 for option to overclock processor? am not expert not even close

We haven't really done it ourselves here, so I guess no..

Hey everyone, good to know you guys are still around. My laptop had been shipped to Del to fix the cooling system, but it really didn't change much. Regarding fan control, the last thing I did before the laptop shipped, I've deciphered most of EC registers on my Vostro and I can pretty much override the fan by using RWE to disable auto mode and set any speed I desire (this part is super finicky), not only two presets at 3200 and 4100rpm that Dell have coded in.
https://github.com/Dolnor/V3450_commenta...i_dsdt.dsl

There are comments there describing what register has to be set what values under some circumstances to achieve this effect. I believe same registers are valid for xps machines. Though I'm not sure how one can code this in at uefi level.

Sent from my GT-I9070 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

[jkbuha]

Hey TW good to see you back as well!

Nice work on the fan - did you ever manage to reincorporate the DSDT back into the BIOS? I'll see if the same RWE procedures also work on my XPS and keep you posted.

With regards to the UEFI insertion, in theory it's possible to insert or modify a menu item using the same IFR logic, but to do this properly we'd most probably need to look closely at the register procedures for an existing BIOS IFR entry we already know of (eg: disable HT) and see what the IFR template uses in that example. I'll bet that the register reads/writes are done in the same setup module.

I would also expect this to be done similarly for the UEFI shell on boot. This may be a good time to decipher one of the more recent Dell BIOSes that enable UEFI natively (does the 3rd gen XPS 15 or Alienware have that?) and hopefully get some more insight into what's left in our BIOSes to unlock.

Separately I'd like to see what we need to do to add a new module such as kasar's XTU proposal - is it just a case of dropping it into the folder and rebuilding the WPH or do we need to make a provision for it in a table of contents module elsewhere in the WPH?

Seems like we're back to work...