Due to Bug#1203748 ("Laptop very slow in battery mode (Lenovo Thinkpad T470) ...") I need a BIOS update for my Thinkpad T470.

I will try to do a BIOS update in Live system, since it's only possible via fwupdmgr, which unfortunately only runs in plain UEFI mode, and the system has been installed in CSM mode (Legacy layer running on top of UEFI mode).

BIOS images and instructions here

Status (Tuesday)

So far I was able to run fwupdmgr to run the firmware update on a openSUSE 15.4 XFCE Live system installed on a USB stick after resizing its EFI/BOOT partition. This creates the following files structure on EFI/BOOT partition of the USB stick.

EFI/opensuse/ EFI/opensuse/fw EFI/opensuse/fw/fwupd-4b37c365-ecb2-4d89-8e15-e93c27c6ce12.cap EFI/opensuse/fw/fwupd-bcff5fd8-0a99-48ad-b630-40e8eadb190e.cap EFI/opensuse/fw/fwupd-4e06f4ae-ab2e-4804-9a23-888e596a31e7.cap EFI/opensuse/fwupdx64.efi It also creates a new boot entry Linux-Firmware-Updater. Unfortunately nothing happens when selecting this entry. Probably the machine is not able to run UEFI programs from a USB Stick or alike.

It might be possible to run this fwupdx64.efi with the appropriate options from an UEFI shell. Unfortunately this machine doesn't offer an UEFI shell. :-( Probably the 'easiest' would be to convert my CSM system to an UEFI system by adding a EFI/BOOT partition. I have installed the sytem with an LVM partition, so this might even be possible with LVM's resize tools.

Success !!! (Wednesday/Thursday)

Thanks to the great assistance of my colleague Raymund W. I was finally able to perform the firmware update successfully. The trick was to create an USB stick with GPT table and EFI/Boot partition with sufficient space (e.g. 100 instead of 20 MB) instead of using the MBR variant created from the Live ISO. So fwupd could create the correct Boot entries.

System is now running with current BIOS version 1.73 (ECP firmware 1.36).

We also switched the system to run as UEFI system. No longer need to run it in CSM mode. :-)

Final step (Friday)

Update from Leap 15.3 to Leap 15.4. So far things are looking good. :-)