February 23, 2026
Solder, spouses, and spicy comments
I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
One laptop liberated, a lost capacitor found, and comments raging about AI, throttling, and love
TLDR: A modder put open-source firmware on a ThinkPad X270—after losing, then replacing, a vital capacitor—and it works. The comments blew up over whether AI helped, begged for fixes to an infamous battery-throttling quirk, and celebrated the supportive spouse, proving old laptops and open-source drama still draw a crowd.
A hardware hero just breathed new life into an old ThinkPad X270 by swapping its factory firmware for coreboot (an open-source replacement for the BIOS). It wasn’t smooth: mid-solder, a teeny capacitor yeeted into the void, prompting an overnight Digi-Key rescue and a wholesome cameo—his wife joined the capacitor pickup run. The fix worked, the laptop booted free, and the crowd went loud. Top thread? “Was AI used?” One camp insists it’s pure skill; the other side suspects code generated by a bot. The author says it’s human sweat, and the community’s split between respect and side-eye.
Key Points
- •Coreboot/libreboot was successfully ported to a ThinkPad X270 (20HM, Kaby Lake).
- •BIOS was dumped and analyzed; key regions (ME, GbE, IFD) were extracted to build a functional image.
- •Pico-serprog on an RP2040-zero with flashprog enabled SPI flash read/write; ifdtool was used for inspection.
- •Deguard deltas were generated using a patched Intel ME, clarifying it need not be vulnerable.
- •Platform differences from the X280 were addressed (disabling Thunderbolt pins; EC variants), and a hardware capacitor was replaced via Digi-Key after a mishap.