[wolfreiser]

I would like to warn you about signature checking.

My HP got a password after a faulty BIOS update (it just hanged up for 30 minutes on one block and I pulled the battery, never do this!)

So I had to fix this. However, my laptop will reset the BIOS if it fails the signature checking. Luckly for me, HP didn't used the BIOS Guard/Boot Guard technology and did the checking on the PEI stage with their own module. The checking part was in the same module as BIOS flasher (IIRC).

The password checking was easy to find because AMI BIOS sources are available on GitHub. Interestingly, HP has a "backdoor" feature that lets you generate a password from code displayed, so I easily unlocked my laptop without any patches. I could have released the generator utility, but, hell, this will let people unlock any other laptop with same kind of BIOS, so no.

As a bonus I had also unlocked hidden settings, which gave me a great control over my CPU and chipset. So I disabled hyperthreding thanks to my paranoia :)