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zamaudio / intelmetool

My tool for working with Intel Management Engine - RETIRED REPO (see coreboot for new upstream)
https://review.coreboot.org/plugins/gitiles/coreboot/+/refs/heads/master/util/intelmetool
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Potentially misleading output on ASUS P6T SE #18

Open ghost opened 6 years ago

ghost commented 6 years ago

I recently ran intelmetool on an ASUS P6T SE to find this output:

$ ./intelmetool -dm
Bad news, you have a `82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller` so you have ME hardware on board and you can't control or disable it, continuing...

MEI not hidden on PCI, checking if visible
MEI device not found

However, running various ME-related tools on a dump of the BIOS chip's contents failed to yield any meaningful information as documented on (https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/105).

I am far from an expert with regards to analyzing the contents of BIOS chips, but the comments in that issue seem to suggest that this platform does not actually contain Intel ME despite using Nehalem.

Are these assessments accurate? If so, the output of intelmetool on this platform should be modified to reflect the lack of ME on this particular platform. Otherwise, this situation may call for further research into how ME is integrated into this particular platform.

zamaudio commented 6 years ago

NB: MEI == pci device attached to the ME hardware.

You definitely have ME hardware on board as stated, but the code I wrote possibly can't find your MEI pci device, it might be missing from the list I have compiled.

Can you please paste the output of:

lspci -nn | grep -E "00:00.0|LPC"
ghost commented 6 years ago 
# lspci -nn | grep -E "00:00.0|LPC"
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port [8086:3405] (rev 13)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller [8086:3a16]
zamaudio commented 6 years ago

If it is running in descriptorless mode, then the ME hardware is disabled, but I'm pretty sure ICH10R has ME co-processor. So intelmetool output is correct in stating you have the co-processor but the pci device is missing,