Thinkpad x220 CoreBoot

Mar 26, 2025

It all started with my love for vintage designs, which made the ThinkPad X220 my daily driver of choice. To push it further, I’m replacing the stock BIOS with the open-source Coreboot to unlock the full RAM speed and, at the same time, exploring hardware tinkering, ROM flashing, and chip reading.

Disclaimer

Coreboot success I’m still in the middle of writing this post, but: I’ve already hit the main goal and successfully flashed Coreboot. 🎉

While researching I learned that Coreboot itself just sets up the hardware and then hands things over to what’s called a payload. You can boot directly into the kernel, which can make the startup noticeably faster. And that's exactly where I'm at right now: I’m experimenting with booting straight into the Linux kernel instead of using GRUB. For now, that’s where I’m at, and once I find some time between classes, I’ll dig deeper and update this article with the full story.


https://doc.coreboot.org/payloads.html

Shoutout to x220.mcdonnelltech.com for putting together such an awesome collection of X220 resources. It saved me hours of digging around the internet! Thank you!

Hardware

Given the age of the laptop I decided to give it some love with a hardware upgrade:

Installation was surprisingly straightforward, a reminder of a time when swapping parts was still common practice.

Linux Install

While installing Linux on the device, I ran head-first into BIOS vs. UEFI quirks. I learned about primary vs. logical partitions from the old MBR scheme, dealt with stubborn SSD leftovers from a previous Windows install, and even had to power-cycle the drive into recovery mode before Debian would cooperate. After a few GRUB hiccups and BIOS tweaks, the system finally booted cleanly.

Replacing BIOS/UEFI with Coreboot

x220_banner

To unleash the full 1866 MHz speed of the RAM (instead of the factory-capped 1333 MHz), a BIOS modification is required. The first plan was to install LibreBoot on the device and live a happy life. LibreBoot is a preconfigured CoreBoot installation with privacy and security hardened settings.

Libreboot makes coreboot easy to use for non-technical users, by providing a fully automated build system, automated build process and user-friendly installation instructions, in addition to regular binary releases that provide pre-compiled ROM images for installation on supported hardware. libreboot.org

While Libreboot would have been a perfectly fine solution, I preferred the idea of going with raw Coreboot. That way, I could learn more about the configuration side of things, rather than relying on defaults.

And of course: The idea of running my own BIOS firmware excites me. It makes the laptop feel even more personal and fully under my control. Plus, I see it as an opportunity to deepen my knowledge of computer hardware and chip programming.

sources and tools used

https://stoisavljevic.com/articles/coreboot
https://garcia.casa/posts/installing-coreboot-on-a-thinkpad-x220/
https://blog.nroach44.id.au/thinkpad-x220-coreboot-and-me-removal.html
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner
https://doc.coreboot.org/

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