[coreboot] Set-top box Geode SC1201 based

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Sun Aug 11 17:53:44 CEST 2013


Hi,

Piero wrote:
> I have in my hands two "old" set-top boxes branded as Kreatel Tornado/K5 2.0.

Good times. When I first came to coreboot some 13 years ago
I worked on a competing product based on the same Geode.


> I tried to find on Google some information about the XpressRom
> development platform (as indicated in the AMD guide Geode document,
> the evaluation platform must be distributed freely) but it seems
> that the software is not longer available.

Don't confuse "freely" with free as in speech, but anyway I don't
think XpressROM was ever free.

XpressLoader was a royalty-free BIOS skeleton for the Geode. It did
not include any significant BIOS funtionality and excluded several
VSA modules, in particular the ones for SoftVGA and what's-it-called
for audio.

XpressROM was a commercial BIOS product based on XpressLoader which
featured the full set of VSA modules.


> I'd like to say you if I could flash inside the set-top box a
> coreboot Linux bios.

coreboot does not support the Kreatel mainboard. There was support
for the Geode SC2200 SoCs at some point, but that code might well
have bitrotted by now. The difference between SC12xx and SC22xx is
that the latter have hardware for driving LCD panels over LVDS.

If you have the right background and want to learn about these old
platforms you could probably reach a working system after a few
months of intense hacking, reverse engineering and studying.


> I want to add an IDE HDD, a Serial Port and customize the box as I want :-)

How much do you value your time?


> no information about the bios programming so I'd like to ask you an
> help how to proceed :)

I somehow know the platforms and I would still recommend not to
bother, but to just buy an ASRock E350M1 mainboard, where coreboot
is known to already work.


//Peter



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