HP EliteBook Folio 9480m
This page is about the notebook HP EliteBook Folio 9480m.
Release status
HP EliteBook Folio 9480m was released in 2014 and is now end of life. It can be bought from a secondhand market like Taobao or eBay.
Required proprietary blobs
The following blobs are required to operate the hardware:
EC firmware
Intel ME firmware
mrc.bin
HP EliteBook Folio 9480m uses SMSC MEC1322 as its embedded controller. The EC firmware is stored in the flash chip, but we don’t need to touch it or use it in the coreboot build process.
Intel ME firmware is in the flash chip. It is not needed when building coreboot.
The Haswell memory reference code binary is needed when building coreboot. Please see mrc.bin.
Programming
Before flashing, remove the battery and the hard drive cover according to the Maintenance and Service Guide of this laptop.
HP EliteBook Folio 9480m has two flash chips, a 16MiB system flash, and a 2MiB private flash. To install coreboot, we need to program both flash chips. Read HP Sure Start for detailed information.
To access the system flash, we need to connect the AC adapter to the machine, then clip on the flash chip with an SOIC-8 clip. An STM32-based flash programmer made with an STM32 development board is tested to work.
To access the private flash chip, we can use a ch341a based flash programmer and flash the chip with the AC adapter disconnected.
Before flashing coreboot, we need to do the following:
Erase the private flash to disable the IFD protection
Modify the IFD to shrink the BIOS region, so that we’ll not use or override the protected bootblock and PEI region, as well as the EC firmware
To erase the private flash chip, attach it with the flash programmer via the SOIC-8 clip, then run:
flashrom -p <programmer> --erase
To modify the IFD, we need a new flash layout. The flash layout of the OEM firmware is:
00000000:00000fff fd
00001000:00002fff gbe
00003000:005fffff me
00600000:00ffffff bios
The default coreboot configuration sets the flash chip size to 12MiB, so set the end of the BIOS region to 0xbfffff in the new layout. The modified IFD is as follows (Platform Data region pd is the region protected by HP Sure Start):
00000000:00000fff fd
00001000:00002fff gbe
00003000:005fffff me
00600000:00bfffff bios
00eb5000:00ffffff pd
Write the above layout in a file, and use ifdtool to modify the IFD of a flash image.
Suppose the above layout file is layout.txt and the origin content of the system flash
is in factory-sys.rom, run:
ifdtool -n layout.txt factory-sys.rom
Then a flash image with a new IFD will be in factory-sys.rom.new.
Flash the IFD of the system flash:
flashrom -p <programmer> --ifd -i fd -w factory-sys.rom.new
Then flash the coreboot image:
# first extend the 12M coreboot.rom to 16M
fallocate -l 16M build/coreboot.rom
flashrom -p <programmer> --ifd -i bios -w build/coreboot.rom
After coreboot is installed, the coreboot firmware can be updated with internal flashing:
flashrom -p internal --ifd -i bios --noverify-all -w build/coreboot.rom
Debugging
The board can be debugged with EHCI debug. The EHCI debug port is the USB port on the left.
Test status
Known issues
GRUB payload freezes just like previous EliteBook laptops
Sometimes the PCIe WLAN module can not be found in the OS after booting to the system
Sometimes all the USB devices can not be found in the OS after S3 resume
Untested
Fingerprint reader
Smart Card reader
Working
i5-4310U CPU with 4G+4G memory
SATA and M.2 SATA disk
Ethernet
WLAN
WWAN
SD card reader
USB
Keyboard and touchpad
DisplayPort
VGA
Dock
Audio output from speaker and headphone jack
Webcam
TPM
EC ACPI
S3 resume
Arch Linux with Linux 5.8.9
Memory initialization with mrc.bin version 1.6.1 Build 2
Graphics initialization with libgfxinit
Payload: SeaBIOS, edk2
EC firmware
KBC Revision 92.15 from OEM firmware version 01.33
KBC Revision 92.17 from OEM firmware version 01.50
Internal flashing under coreboot
Technology
CPU |
Intel Haswell-ULT |
PCH |
Intel Lynx Point Low Power |
EC |
SMSC MEC1322 |
Coprocessor |
Intel Management Engine |