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Coreboot Skulls Seabios how to change the boot-menu-wait time

For the purpose of this guide I assume you have flashed already your Thinkpad x230 with Coreboot skulls.

How you already know to do so you have flashed externally the top and (eventually) the botton rom separately using an external hardware and the skull scripts.

To set a different duration of the boot menu, we need to edit the CBFS etc/ directory and set a different waiting time which the Seabios default is 2,5 seconds.

To do so we need to retrieve the full image of your current bios (the 12mb skulls rom) and we can do reading the chip from internal.

As usual when performing actions on the bios you need to have linux installed and to have booted your distro with iomem=relaxed option in your grub configuration and having flashrom installed.

You can run 

sudo flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick -r skulls.rom

as you can see the -r option will read your bios..  wait until the process ends.. it will retrieve the current image of your bios (which we have named skulls.rom) in 1 single 12mb image in your /home folder 

Now we need a program called cbfstool which is contained in the coreboot and libreboot utilities.

if you don't want to download all the repository you can simply download from my github here 

https://github.com/m4rc0linux/x230-coreboot

 Once you have downloaded put it on your /home folder and..

if you wish to extend the time wait menu to 5 seconds run the following  command 

./cbfstool skulls.rom add-int -i 5000 -n etc/boot-menu-wait

if instead you wish to decrease to 1 second only type

./cbfstool skulls.rom add-int -i 1000 -n etc/boot-menu-wait

 Now you need to flash back your modified skulls rom. Form me has worked:

sudo flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick -w m4rc0x230.rom --ifd --image bios -V --ifd --image bios -V

but also alternatively

sudo flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick -w m4rc0x230.rom  -V

Enjoy your new settings!

Please don't forget to have look to the amazing skulls project https://github.com/merge/skulls and to the official coreboot seabios guide for further details https://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS

Here you can see my x230 with skulls booting Trisquel 9 and Windows 10 (where I have set the wait time to 1 sec)



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