In what’s perhaps one of the most impressive laptop reverse engineering posts in recent memory, [Andrey Konovalov] brings us an incredibly detailed story of how he’s discovered and successfully enabled a USB device controller in a ThinkPad X1 Carbon equipped with a 6th gen Intel CPU.
If you ever wanted to peek at the dirty secrets of a somewhat modern-day Intel CPU-based system, this write-up spares you no detail, and spans dozens of abstraction layers — from Linux drivers and modifying NVRAM to custom USB cable building and BIOS chip flashing, digging deep into undocumented PCH registers for the dessert.
All [Andrey] wanted was to avoid tinkering with an extra Raspberry Pi. While using a PCIe connected device controller, he’s found a reference to intel_xhci_usb_sw-role-switch in Linux sysfs, and dove into a rabbit hole, where he discovered that the IP core used for the laptop’s USB ports has a ‘device’ mode that can be enabled. A dig through ACPI tables confirmed this, but also highlighted that the device is disabled in BIOS. What’s more, it turned out to be locked away behind a hidden menu. Experiments in unlocking that menu ensued, in particular when it comes to bypassing Intel Boot Guard, a mechanism that checks BIOS image signatures before boot.
Continue reading “ThinkPad X1 Carbon Turned USB Device Through Relentless Digging”
