Hanno's blog

Recently, my old harddisk produced some errors. As I care for my data, I immediately replaced it and decided to invest in an SSD.

My laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T61) is already some years old, so I'm quite aware that I won't get the best possible performance out of it. But I found something really interesting. The BIOS seems to limit the SATA II speed and there's an unofficial BIOS mod to remove that limitation. It's also available for a couple of other Thinkpad models (beside T61 also for R61, X61, X300 and variants of them).

The BIOS mod also does a number of other things, for example the official BIOS has a whitelist of allowed wireless chips. That gets removed.

The full feature list from the readme file:
- Disabled whitelist check.
- Enabled SATA II full speed.
- Added SLIC 2.1 table.
- Removed "Thermal sensing error" boot message (Penryn CPUs).
- Added dual-IDA support.

Obivous Warning: You're doing this at your own risk. If any unofficial BIOS destroys your laptop or your data, that's bad luck. The only thing I can tell is that I didn't experience any problems and that so far, a lot of people seem to use these BIOS mods without problems.

Now I did some before-after-benchmarking. I used hdparm -tT /dev/sda and a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/out.img bs=8k count=256k. I started the benchmark after a fresh boot without anything else running to avoid disturbances. I ran the tests a couple of times and will only give you the last result of each tests, but they didn't differ much. The results:

	before	after
hdparm cached read	3069.01 MB/s	6900.56 MB/s
hdparm buffered read	131.38 MB/s	251.79 MB/s
dd write	106 MB/s	209 MB/s

Quite impressive, isn't it? I just doubled the speed of my disk for free. I'm aware that benchmarking is a tricky business and the impact this has on my overall system performance is probably difficult to put in numbers, but the results are significant enough that I think it was worth it.

Slightly related: There's also a modified firmware for the Optiarc AD7910A CD/DVD burner that's shipped in my laptop.

Today I faced an interesting Linux problem that made me learn a couple of things I'd like to share. At first, we found an issue on a Thinkpad X301 notebook that was fixed in a newer BIOS version. So we wanted to do a BIOS update. Lenovo provides BIOS updates either for Windows or as bootable ISO CD-images. But the device had no CD-drive and only Linux installed. First we tried unetbootin, a tool to create bootable USB sticks out of ISO-Images. That didn't work.
So I had a deeper look at the ISO. What puzzled me was that when mounting it as a loopback device, there were no files on it. After some research I learned that there are different ways to create bootable CDs and one of them is the El Torito extension. It places an image of a harddisk on the CD, when booting, the image is loaded into memory and an OS can be executed (this probably only works for quite simple OSes like DOS, the Lenovo BIOS Upgrade disk is based on PC-DOS). There's a small PERL-script called geteltorito that is able to extract such images from ISO files.
It's possible to boot such harddisk images with grub and memdisk (part of syslinux). Install syslinux, place the file memdisk into /boot (found in /usr/lib/syslinux/ or /usr/share/syslinux/) and add something like this to your grub config:

Or for grub2:

Now you can select bios update in your boot menu and it should boot the BIOS upgrade utility.

(Note that this does not work for all Lenovo BIOS updates, only for those using an El Torito harddisk image - you can mount your iso with mount -o loop [path_to_iso] [mount_path] to check, if there are any files, this method is not for you)

I wrote a few days ago (only in german) about my requests to the 1und1-support for information about the hardware of our rootserver (to complete the PCI ID database).

Now, after their first reply, I now got another mail with more useful information: They pointed me to the tool dmidecode, which can find lot's of information about the BIOS and the motherboard. Didn't know that before, it's also useful to find out the BIOS version on a running system.

Now, this looks like what I was looking for:
Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: FUJITSU SIEMENS
Product Name: D2030-A1