(UEFI) Dell XPS 15z L511z modded BIOS - and HOWTO

[jkbuha]

Hi and welcome aboard. At the moment, as your bios is AMI not Phoenix and we currently have not found any way to unlock the features.

Hopefully we'll also be able to unlock this BIOS soon as well.

[newname]

Many thanks jkbuha, for I won't have to waste my time searching for a way.

regards,

[TimeWalker]

Turns out there's a kext and even an app to control fan is OSX on Dell machines.. there are even sources published for it, which need minor tweaking.
Search for i8kfan.kext and i8kfanGUI.app by PotatoSalad and or i8k.kext by tweakbsd. Both of these solutions are based on i8kutil code from linux.
The later implementation from tweakbsd is able to override automatic BIOS mode but doesn't work with the GUI app.. he hasn't published sources though so how he does thus through DELLDIAG is unknown. For me it behaves erratically - it will freeze the system for half a second every couple of seconds because it accesses SMI on 0xB2 to get and set data.. not sure if it is the case with Inspiron and Latitude machines for which this stuff was originally written in Windows back in 2003 I believe. It was ported to linux in 2005, first ported to OSX in 2007 and now updated this autumn of 2012.

I'm bloody tired of waiting for my HDD caddy to arrive, so I'm holding away installing the SSD. Probably will repaste while i'm in there ..
@kasar did your laptop drop temps significantly after repasting?

[kasar]

yeah, after repaste and dustfilter removal the temps droped significally ^^

that plus the undervolted bioses make the laptop like a fridge


oh, will you pinmod the machine to bypass the descriptor wehn you take it appart? ^^

it would be fine if someone else confirms ME firmware mods working on their machines

as far I know I was the only able to get it working here.

http://forum.techinferno.com/general-not...ptops.html

moral hazzard tried but did not gained BCLK overclocking, I guess I am a lucky guy or just the most mad to take the freaking chip out (several times)

[kasar]

hey guys, give a look to this topic

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps...os-34.html

"followme" managed to backup and flash the bios from the shell on his L702X, he also have another interesting ideas like replace the diagnosis tool with a external uefi shell, I think that should be more usefull than just diagnosis tools since we seems unable to just enable the internal efi shell directly ^^

[TimeWalker]

Nothing really new there besides the idea of swapping ePsa for shell, which is somewhat useful. The uefi unlocked from factory and enabled BIOS for xps17 is a private case, which allows the user of a given model to launch uefi stuff from recovery capsule, for us this is not the case. In a retrospective there a clue to setting uefi mode as always enabled in the a19 BIOS of xps17. Comparing old and new versions of the setup advanced module can lead us to a byte that needs flipped. Regarding the flasher from the capsule - I had it launched from shell before, but there is virtually no point in this for us because uefi is disabled as an option and as you mention it, setting it enabled will unload capsule from memory.

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@kasar
try swapping:
00 5B 0D 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 5B 0D 01 00 00 00
with
00 5B 0D 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 5B 0D 01 00 00 01
in PlatformSetupAdvanced to see if this sets UEFI boot as enabled by default ...
I won't be around my laptop till tomorrow evening.

[t6590]

@jkbuha how did you OC your cpu i have same computer with the exception of the cpu being core i5
2540m running at 2.5ghz(3.1 turbo)...i'm not sure i understand your previous post on the matter.
maybe let me see your clover config file or something.

and also do you get any trackpad issues using clover....since i moved from chameleon its all over the place.

[kasar]

yeah, I am also interested on your clover settings and clover revision number.

that OC looks good

[TimeWalker]

There's a weird changelog in one of XPS 15 and 17 BIOSes: "Sync solution from Queen for IFIR fan noise issue"
For L502x after this A10 BIOS it seems like the fan is behaving correctly, doesnt it ? I'm just curious because this "Queen" appears to be a model of some Inspiron 15R laptop I believe, which is what Florin9doi has.. so they had synced changes from AMI to Phoenix, which can't be the case, so it must be EC that was altered .. so now I'm bloody interested in what they changed...

P.S. and remind me again how do I unpack these bioses ffs.. all I get is

[kasar]

well, I never had issues with the L502x, maybe after I bough it, I noticed the fan started and stoped all the time, but didnt cared so much, and aparently went to normal after updating the bios.

did you finally managed to open L502X bioses with the phoenix slix tool?

else let me know and I can send you the dump folders from the tool of the A10 bios