Hi people!
First of all, thanks a lot for the information in this thread. It is really a valuable resource for everyone.
That said, I wanted to ask you for some guidance. I'm want to use my old Lenovo G510 as a pfsense router with a mini-pcie NIC installed in the WLAN port. I've successfully followed this
guide to remove the whitelist from the BIOS, and I've tested this works with an old WLAN card. However, the laptop doesn't detect the mini-pcie RTL8111F card I bought when installed in the WLAN port.
Even though I have some experience with electronics and microcontrollers, this is my first adventure with bios modding. My understanding is that since we have a PCI-e 2.0 1x lane in the WLAN port, the system should in principle be able to load the NIC correctly. So far, my research has led me to the following ideas on what might be missing:
- Missing DXE driver to load the NIC during UEFI initialization?
- Grounds, or voltage dividers, that feed reserved WLAN signals (like radio kill, etc.) might be required in the new card?
- Maybe pull-up or pull-down resistors missing in the new NIC card?
- I think there is also a USB lane in the WLAN port. The laptop might expect something being there in order to initialize the card?
I've been trying to analyze UEFI code using UEFITool and ghidra, but it is a bit too complicated. Maybe you can point me to a particular direction on how to achieve this?
If you need it, my working modded ROM is here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JA3uZQS...KPv2o/view.
Thanks a lot in advance.