[coreboot] Thin Client Compaq Evo T20

Juergen Beisert juergen127 at kreuzholzen.de
Thu May 15 12:14:16 CEST 2008


On Tuesday 13 May 2008 07:38, Philip Loewen wrote:
> Thanks for your replies. It's exciting to have my questions
> received so well.
>
> I'm not quite allergic to opening the case of my unit, but I
> should be totally honest about my plan to be a 'consumer'
> rather than a 'producer' of coreboot knowledge. Investing
> time and money in hardware to program the flash ROM and to
> detect small steps toward success would take me off-line
> from other projects (like earning a living) that I can't
> afford to quit.
>
> My little Evo has a socket for additional flash memory, but
> the socket is empty and that's OK with me:
>
> I am using the T20 as a thin client for several hours each
> day, with gentoo linux kernel 2.6.24. I get X graphics at
> 1280x1024 at 16bpp, the maximum supported by the GX1

Maximum support up to 2048x1024 at 16bpp (its simply a question of available 
memory bandwidth).

> by using a patched version of GRUB that lies to the kernel about what
> memory should be used where.

coreboot can setup the correct memory mapping between main and video memory 
for the old GX1.

> This patch, kindly supplied by 
> others, sacrifices the framebuffer console displays, though.

With the kernel built in framebuffer console you can't work, if there is no 
VSA in your system. You need a native GX1 framebuffer driver with coreboot.

> (All of them!) I am hoping that coreboot might get me
> everything:
> best-possible video, hi-res framebuffer,

Yes.

> and efficient [non-emulated] sound support.

Partly yes. Difficult, because the sound hardware cannot generate a regular 
interrupt. I'm still out of luck to write a small system management code that 
only forwards SMI occurrence to a regular interrupt the kernel could handle.

Juergen




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