Tag Archives: windows

Updating Intel Management Engine firmware on a Lenovo without a Windows Install

Posted on by
17

This is how I updated my Intel ME firmware on my Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 4 (reports say this also has worked for Gen5 machines). These instructions are pretty strongly inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15744152

Why? Intel security advisory and CVE-2017-5705, CVE-2017-5708, CVE-2017-5711, and CVE-2017-5712 should be reason enough.

You will need:

  • To download about 3.5GB of stuff
  • A USB key
  • Linux installed
  • WINE or a Windows box to run two executables (because self extracting archives are a thing on Windows apparently)
  • A bit of technical know-how. A shell prompt shouldn’t scare you too hard.

Steps:

  1. Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10ISO and download the 32-bit ISO.
  2. Mount the ISO as a loopback device (e.g. by right clicking and choosing to mount, or by doing ‘sudo mount -o loop,ro file.iso /mnt’
  3. Go to Lenovo web site for Drivers & Software for your laptop, under Chipset, there’s ME Firmware and Software downloads You will need both. It looks like this:
  4. Run both exe files with WINE or on a windows box to extract the archives, you do not need to run the installers at the end.
  5. you now need to extract the management engine drivers. You can do this in  ~/.wine/drive_c/DRIVERS/WIN/AMT, with “cabextract SetupME.exe” or (as suggested in the comments) you can use the innoextract utility (from linux) to extract them (a quick check shows this to work)
  6. Save off HECI_REL folder, it’s the only extracted thing you’ll need.
  7. Go and install https://wimlib.net/ – we’re going to use it to create the boot disk. (it may be packaged for your distro).
    If you don’t have the path /usr/lib/syslinux/modules/bios on your system but you do have /usr/share/syslinux/modules/bios – you will need to change a bit of the file programs/mkwinpeimg.in to point to the /usr/share locations rather than /usr/lib before you install wimlib. This probably isn’t needed if you’re installing from packages, but may be requried if you’re on, say, Fedora.
  8. Copy ~/.wine/drive_c/DRIVERS to a new folder, e.g. “winpe_overlay” (or copy from the Windows box you extracted things on)
  9. Use mkwinpeimg to create the boot disk, pointing it to the mounted Windows 10 installer and the “winpe_overlay”: 
    mkwinpeimg -W /path/to/mounted/windows10-32bit-installer/ -O winpe_overlay disk.img
  10. Use ‘dd’ to write it to your USB key
  11. Reboot, go into BIOS and turn Secure Boot OFF, Legacy BIOS ON, and AMT ON.
  12. Boot off the USB disk you created.
  13. In the command prompt of the booted WinPE environment, run the following to start the update: 
    cd \
cd HECI_REL\win10
    drvload heci.inf
    cd \
    cd win\me
    MEUpdate.cmd

    It should look something like this:

  14. Reboot, go back into BIOS and change your settings back to how you started.

Windows NT4 for PowerPC guest on OPAL on POWER8 in qemu

Posted on by
4

Sometimes, programming is just for fun. This is what PREPHV is for Andrei Warkentin. To quote the README:

“This is mostly a huge ugly hack, derived from my
ppc64le_hello code. The running philosophy here is
to throw things together late at night with my family
asleep and see how far I get without a real design
or without a real desire to implement boring things
like IDE (*sigh*) emulation”

Since my day job is maintaining the firmware that it runs on, I decided to have a go (it also ties in with the retro stuff I’ve been blogging about). So…

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-22-20and I’m off! (yes, this is the very latest qemu and skiboot):

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-23-32screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-23-48Yes, prephv does clear all thirty two megabytes of guest memory

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-24-15A quick diversion, if you try Windows NT 3.51 for PowerPC, you get this:

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-18-17-35

But on NT4, you continue unharmed:

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-22-32A sign I needed to hack my filesystem of bits of NT installer bits a bit more:

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-22-45But, on my next try:

screenshot-from-2016-10-30-17-25-26Well… looks like there’s an instruction that needs to be emulated (and there’s no code to currently do that). Mind you… this is decently far into booting before we hit anything fatal, which is a pretty impressive effort – and it is tempting to continue and see if it’ll run on real hardware and if it could be made to work well enough to not find any disks :)

Microsoft Chicago – retro in qemu!

Posted on by
1

So, way back when (sometime in the early 1990s) there was Windows 3.11 and times were… for Workgroups. There was this Windows NT thing, this OS/2 thing and something brewing at Microsoft to attempt to make the PC less… well, bloody awful for a user.

Again, thanks to abandonware sites, it’s possible now to try out very early builds of Microsoft Chicago – what would become Windows 95. With the earliest build I could find (build 56), I set to work. The installer worked from an existing Windows 3.11 install.

I ended up using full system emulation rather than normal qemu later on, as things, well, booted in full emulation and didn’t otherwise (I was building from qemu master… so it could have actually been a bug fix).

chicago-launch-setupMmmm… Windows 3.11 File Manager, the fact that I can still use this is a testament to something, possibly too much time with Windows 3.11.

chicago-welcome-setupchicago-setupUnfortunately, I didn’t have the Plus Pack components (remember Microsoft Plus! ?- yes, the exclamation mark was part of the product, it was the 1990s.) and I’m not sure if they even would have existed back then (but the installer did ask).

chicago-install-dirObviously if you were testing Chicago, you probably did not want to upgrade your working Windows install if this was a computer you at all cared about. I installed into C:\CHICAGO because, well – how could I not!

chicago-installingThe installation went fairly quickly – after all, this isn’t a real 386 PC and it doesn’t have of-the-era disks – everything was likely just in the linux page cache.

chicago-install-networkI didn’t really try to get network going, it may not have been fully baked in this build, or maybe just not really baked in this copy of it, but the installer there looks a bit familiar, but not like the Windows 95 one – maybe more like NT 3.1/3.51 ?

But at the end… it installed and it was time to reboot into Chicago:
chicago-bootSo… this is what Windows 95 looked like during development back in July 1993 – nearly exactly two years before release. There’s some Windows logos that appear/disappear around the place, which are arguably much cooler than the eventual Windows 95 boot screen animation. The first boot experience was kind of interesting too:
Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-57-00Luckily, there was nothing restricting the beta site ID or anything. I just entered the number 1, and was then told it needed to be 6 digits – so beta site ID 123456 it is! The desktop is obviously different both from Windows 3.x and what ended up in Windows 95.

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-57-48Those who remember Windows 3.1 may remember Dr Watson as an actual thing you could run, but it was part of the whole diagnostics infrastructure in Windows, and here (as you can see), it runs by default. More odd is the “Switch To Chicago” task (which does nothing if opened) and “Tracker”. My guess is that the “Switch to Chicago” is the product of some internal thing for launching the new UI. I have no ideawhat the “Tracker” is, but I think I found a clue in the “Find File” app:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 14-10-10Not only can you search with regular expressions, but there’s “Containing text”, could it be indexing? No, it totally isn’t. It’s all about tracking/reporting problems:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 14-15-19Well, that wasn’t as exciting as I was hoping for (after all, weren’t there interesting database like file systems being researched at Microsoft in the early 1990s?). It’s about here I should show the obligatory About box:
Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-58-10It’s… not polished, and there’s certainly that feel throughout the OS, it’s not yet polished – and two years from release: that’s likely fair enough. Speaking of not perfect:

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-59-03When something does crash, it asks you to describe what went wrong, i.e. provide a Clue for Dr. Watson:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-09-22

But, most importantly, Solitaire is present! You can browse the Programs folder and head into Games and play it! One odd tihng is that applications have two >> at the end, and there’s a “Parent Folder” entry too.

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-01-24Solitair itself? Just as I remember.

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 21-21-27Notably, what is missing is anything like the Start menu, which is probably the key UI element introduced in Windows 95 that’s still with us today. Instead, you have this:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 11-55-15That’s about the least exciting Windows menu possible. There’s the eye menu too, which is this:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 11-56-12More unfinished things are found in the “File cabinet”, such as properties for anything:
Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-02-00But let’s jump into Control Panels, which I managed to get to by heading to C:\CHICAGO\Control.sys – which isn’t exactly obvious, but I think you can find it through Programs as well.Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-02-41Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-05-40The “Window Metrics” application is really interesting! It’s obvious that the UI was not solidified yet, that there was a lot of experimenting to do. This application lets you change all sorts of things about the UI:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-05-57My guess is that this was used a lot internally to twiddle things to see what worked well.

Another unfinished thing? That familiar Properties for My Computer, which is actually “Advanced System Features” in the control panel, and from the [Sample Information] at the bottom left, it looks like we may not be getting information about the machine it’s running on.

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-06-39

You do get some information in the System control panel, but a lot of it is unfinished. It seems as if Microsoft was experimenting with a few ways to express information and modify settings.

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-07-13But check out this awesome picture of a hard disk for Virtual Memory:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-07-47The presence of the 386 Enhanced control panel shows how close this build still was to Windows 3.1:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-08-08At the same time, we see hints of things going 32 bit – check out the fact that we have both Clock and Clock32! Notepad, in its transition to 32bit, even dropped the pad and is just Note32!

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-11-10Well, that’s enough for today, time to shut down the machine:
Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-15-45

Windows 3.11 nostalgia

Posted on by
4

Because OS/2 didn’t go so well… let’s try something I’m a lot more familiar with. To be honest, the last time I in earnest used Windows on the desktop was around 3.11, so I kind of know it back to front (fun fact: I’ve read the entire Windows 3.0 manual).

It turns out that once you have MS-DOS installed in qemu, installing Windows 3.11 is trivial. I didn’t even change any settings for Qemu, I just basically specced everything up to be very minimal (50MB RAM, 512mb disk).

win31-setupwin31-disk4win31-installedWindows 3.11 was not a fun time as soon as you had to do anything… nightmares of drivers, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT plague my mind. But hey, it’s damn fast on a modern processor.

Ghosts of MySQL Past, Part 9: BEST. Team. Name. EVER.

Posted on by
3

(This is part 9 in a series, part 8 is here – because reverse chronological order totally makes sense here)

So, back around 2007, somebody noticed that an awful lot of the downloads of MySQL and associated utilities from mysql.com were for Windows. Of course, it’s then immediately pointed out that the vast majority of Linux users will not be heading to mysql.com to download MySQL, instead using the packages from their distribution.

However, the number of people working on MySQL who had ever even attempted to compile the MySQL server on Windows when given the number of mysql users on Windows was… well…. rather embarrassing. This is very common with free and open source software – especially historically.

If you look back 10 years, Linux on the desktop was “next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop”, you know, just like how it is now. Except that while today, everything “just works” on modern Linux distros and it is Windows that is an absolute arse to get all the drivers for your hardware going, it was not that long ago that it was the other way around. Also, back then it was much more common for it to be hard to get FOSS into companies… because of a variety of reasons that weren’t valid, but were something we had to spend time explaining back then.

I’m trying to remember the MySQL developers at the time who I knew attempted to do all their MySQL Server development on Windows…. I can think of Reggie along with Vlad and Iggy (both of who joined later). It was quite rightly pointed out that the MySQL experience on Windows was very much one of “UNIX application ported to Windows” rather than “Windows server application, that also comes in a UNIX version.”

MySQL basically did absolutely nothing the way you’d expect a piece of Windows server software to do it. So, a team was put together. Well, more of a task force.

The Windows Task Force (yes, WTF) was born. It is also the best team name in the history of team names and gives me a good chuckle to this day.

Many things came out of this, including (IIRC) an Installer that we actually could find the source code for and didn’t require Delphi to build, the ability to build the server on Windows from a bzr source tree (and not need Linux/UNIX around to build some parts of the server) and making the server behave a bit more like what you’d expect if you were a Windows administrator. There were also a bunch of limits lifted due to the way that MySQL was ported to Windows, which I won’t go into here.

ZFS: could have been the future of UNIX Filesystems

Posted on by
31

There was a point a few years ago where Sun could have had the next generation UNIX filesystem. It was in Solaris (and people were excited), there was a port to MacOS X (that was quite exciting for people) and there was a couple of ways to run it on linux (and people were excited). So… instead of the fractured landscape of ext3, HFS+ and (the various variations of) UFS we could have had one file system that was common between all of the commonly used UNIX-like variants. Think of being able to use a file system on a removable drive that isn’t FAT and being able to take it from machine to machine (well… Windows would be a problem, but it always is).

There was some really great work done in OpenSolaris with integration between the file manager and ZFS snapshots (a slider bar to browse the history of a directory, an idea I’ve championed for over a decade now, although the Sun implementation was likely completely independently developed). The integration with the package manager was also completely awesome, crash safe upgrades!

However, all this is pretty much moot. Solaris is used by fewer people than ever, it’s out of OS X and BTRFS is going to take the place that ZFS could have held in the Linux world. So, unfortunately, ZFS is essentially dead. This is a shame…. it could have been something huge.

anti-anti-feature: Windows license stickers

Posted on by
1

Anti-Anti-Feature: An antifeature that doesn’t actually do what it’s meant to (something you didn’t want in the first place)

My laptop came with a Windows Vista license. An anti-feature in itself – I didn’t want it, have never used it (I run Ubuntu and love freedom).

However, if you try and read the license key off this sticker, it’s increasingly difficult to do so. It’s being worn away. Why? Because it’s on the bottom of the laptop and I’m using it on my lap (so friction rubs it away).

Luckily I don’t run Windows Vista and need to re-install it any time soon.

MySQL Cluster (NDB) on Win32 progress

Posted on by
Reply

Many things have been happenning in the land of NDB on Win32 as of late.

I’ve fixed about 700 compiler warnings (some of which were real bugs) leaving about 161 to go on Win32 (VS2003). We’re getting a few more warnings on Win64 (some of which look merely semantic, while others could be real bugs), but the main focus now is getting 32bit going really well.

I fixed a number of bugs that were around preventing lots of things from working properly:

Disk Data (i.e. CREATE TABLESPACE, CREATE LOGFILE GROUP, and CREATE TABLE… TABLESPACE ts1 STORAGE DISK) now works. The main problem here was that our filesystem abstraction layer for the NDB kernel (ndbd) once had a Win32 port… which has sorely bitrotted over the years. As new features were introduced to the file IO interface, they (of course) weren’t also added to the Win32 abstraction. In the disk data case, the OM_INIT feature, which on FSOPENREQ (open a file) allows data to be passed in for initialising the file. Previously, I fixed this to allocate the file on disk and create a file of the same size, but i didn’t add the feature that writes initial data to the file. This caused bugs as soon as you tried to use the disk data tables (the files weren’t initialised, so you hit asserts on corrupt disk data files).

Paths in the server: for whatever bizarre and stupid reason, the MySQL server can end up having paths to a table as ./database/table OR .\database\table. The latter *never* shows up on non-Win32 platforms but can *sometimes* show up on Win32. Ick ick ick ick. Anyway, we (in the NDB handler) weren’t dealing with this properly, causing problems around some metadata ops.

Our pushbuild system takes each push to a source tree, builds it on a variety of platfroms and runs the mysql-test-run.pl test suite. The Win32 hosts are actually running on vmware. In order to make tests run faster, on Linux we use /dev/shm for the data files. Microsoft Windows doesn’t have a good ram disk, so we create a file on /dev/shm on the host and map that as a drive inside Windows (and format it as NTFS). This drive is only 1GB. This is not enough disk space for running all the clusters (yes, plural) started by the test suite (and everything would die with ENOSPC). The workaround I’ve come up with is that for debug builds, we simply enable NTFS file compression on files ndbd creates.

Win64 is also working! Pushbuild builds and runs on 64bit, and the Win64 host is building with NDB and passing about the same amount of tests as the Win32 hosts!

The bad news is that the NDB with replication tests are pretty much all failing… so I’m fairly confident that cluster replication is very broken on Win32 (and 64) at the moment.

I’ve had to do a fair amount of fixing on a bunch of the test cases (mainly to do with finding where various NDB utilities are). They’ve also prompted fixes in NDB (automatically converting / to \ in ndbd on Win32 for CREATE DATAFILE/UNDOFILE).

If you want to give it a go – you can get the source from launchpad. Either in the mysql-5.1-telco-6.4 tree, or if you want a few more things fixed, always have a look at the mysql-5.1-telco-6.4-win tree. Hopefully both are synced with the latest internal trees (i.e. plain 6.4 is working on win32) by the time you read this.

Iggy and I discussed installers for NDB on Windows in Riga, and we should have something soon-ish for those of you who don’t build from source.

Building MySQL on Windows – MySQL Forge Wiki

Posted on by
Reply

Building MySQL on Windows – MySQL Forge Wiki

This one covers running mysqld in the VisualStudio debugger, which can be useful.

I have no special ndb_mgmd.exe or ndbd.exe in debugger instructions or wisdom (running them from mysql-test-run.pl at least). I’ve attached debugger to already running (started by mysql-test-run.pl) ndb processes, but haven’t made any changes to mtr to make it like the mysqld of “go and enter this”.

Building MySQL Cluster on Windows (for Windows)

Posted on by
8

You will need:

  • CMake (at least 2.4.7)
  • Bazaar (the newer the better – 1.6 was just released – at least use that)
  • Gnu Bison
  • Visual Studio (Express works, but I’m talking about 2005 here)
  • … and all this installed on a Microsoft Windows machine.
  • … and to hate yourself, you are going to be using Windows after all.

Then, get and build it:

  1. Get the source:
    bzr branch lp:~mysql/mysql-server/mysql-5.1-telco-6.4-win
  2. Run CMake. the CMake GUI can now be used to select compile options! You’ll have to set the path “where is the source code” to where you put the source code in step 1.
  3. Hit “Configure” in CMake
  4. Select the target (i.e. the version of Visual Studio you’re going to use)
  5. Select the build options. HINT: WITH_NDBCLUSTER_STORAGE_ENGINE may be a useful one to enable
  6. Hit Configure again
  7. Hit Ok.
  8. CMAKE now generates the Visual Studio project. Use this time to drink some good scotch.
  9. Open Mysql.sln (which should launch Visual Studio)
  10. Go Build -> Build Solution (or hit F7)

Now you can go and have much whisky as this will take a few minutes. You should now have a set of built binaries for MySQL Cluster on Windows. Scary.

ndb_mgm.exe builds (and works) in mysql-5.1-telco-6.4-win

Posted on by
Reply

“MySQL Cluster 6.4 Windows tree” branch in Launchpad

(which really should have the -fail suffix… but anyway)

In what will (soon) be mirrored to launchpad, all but 17 targets (yeah, working on that… but it’s out of 130 or something) build.

Not only that, I’ve used the management client (ndb_mgm.exe) to monitor the cluster running my Bugzilla instance (which is now a rather old 6.3 build).

Getting closer to NDB on Windows.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.