GoKawiilOver 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU page in the GNU Emacs editor. Free software back then and certainly now is quite usable, typically without much closed-source software. One area where free software is lacking is firmware and this led me to want to try libreboot on that ThinkPad x60. A few years forward and I became a coreboot contributor and eventually got a job at 9elements because of this. In that journey I amassed quite a hefty ThinkPad collection. I wanted something that was speedier and 64-bit so I got a ThinkPad x200 which I ran for a few years. I got a ThinkPad x220 a few years later, as the Sandy Bridge chip is substantially faster than the Core 2 Duo inside the x200. To port or improve existing coreboot ports I received a ThinkPad x201 and R500. A few years back someone figured out a way to get past Boot Guard (deguard ) on Intel Skylake/Kabylake, so I got myself a ThinkPad t480 and I'm very happy with it.
Does anyone know a good rehab center for this kind of addiction?
Along that ThinkPad hoarding journey one generation was missing: the ThinkPad x61. It has a GM965 northbridge and an ICH8 southbridge. The northbridge is somewhat similar to GM45 (supported on ThinkPad x200) except being DDR2-only and the ICH8 southbridge is somewhat similar to the already supported ICH9. There are no leaked docs out there on this platform so reverse engineering would be the only way. Some people attempted this in the past using tools like SerialICE which runs the firmware in QEMU and forwards IO and MMIO to the actual hardware, but they didn't manage to produce a working coreboot port.
So my dream was to eventually port it.