Board:thomson/ip1000

The Thomson IP1000 is designed by Thomson Electronics. It is the RCA RM4100's big brother. It is a great little set-top-box for coreboot. Linux has never been able to run on this board until now. Maintained by Joseph Smith.

A full bootlog of this board running coreboot is available for reference.

Status

Device/functionality	Status	Comments
CPU
CPU works	OK	Low Voltage Intel(R) Pentium(R) III CPU 933MHz
L1 cache enabled	OK
L2 cache enabled	OK	512 KB
L3 cache enabled	N/A
Multiple CPU support	N/A
Multi-core support	N/A
Hardware virtualization	N/A
RAM
EDO	N/A
SDRAM	N/A
SO-DIMM	OK	Sodimm socket and onboard 64MB PC133.
DDR	N/A
DDR2	N/A
DDR3	N/A
Dual channel support	N/A
ECC support	N/A
On-board Hardware
On-board IDE 3.5"	OK	Tested with hard drive.
On-board IDE 2.5"	OK	Tested with 2.5" hard drive and adapter.
On-board SATA	N/A
On-board SCSI	Unknown
On-board USB	OK	Tested with USB keyboard.
On-board VGA	OK	VGA support in coreboot works fine. TV-Out is still a WIP.
On-board Ethernet	OK	Onboard Intel 82562ET LAN On Motherboard (LOM) Design.
On-board Audio	OK
On-board Modem	N/A
On-board FireWire	N/A
On-board Smartcard reader	N/A
On-board CompactFlash	OK
On-board PCMCIA	N/A
On-board Wifi	N/A
On-board Bluetooth	N/A
On-board SD card reader	N/A
Add-on slots/cards
ISA add-on cards	N/A
Audio/Modem-Riser (AMR/CNR) cards	N/A
PCI add-on cards	WIP
Mini-PCI add-on cards	Unknown
Mini-PCI-Express add-on cards	Unknown
PCI-X add-on cards	Unknown
AGP graphics cards	N/A
PCI Express x1 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x2 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x4 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x8 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x16 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x32 add-on cards	N/A
HTX add-on cards	N/A
Legacy / Super I/O
Floppy	N/A
Serial port 1 (COM1)	OK
Serial port 2 (COM2)	OK	IR is connected to COM2. Tested: Wireless (IR) keyboard on COM2.
Parallel port	OK	There is no actual Parallel connector, the Parallel is used to enable IR and control 3 LEDs.
PS/2 keyboard	N/A
PS/2 mouse	N/A
Game port	N/A
Infrared	OK	Should work fine but has not been tested with lirc and a remote yet.
PC speaker	N/A
DiskOnChip	N/A
Input
Trackpoint	N/A
Touchpad	N/A
Fn Hotkeys	N/A
Fingerprint Reader	N/A
Laptop
Docking VGA	N/A
Docking LAN	N/A
Docking USB	N/A
Docking Audio	N/A
Docking Displayport	N/A
Thinklight	N/A
Webcam	N/A
Miscellaneous
Sensors / fan control	OK	lm-sensors uses i801, smsc47m192.
Hardware watchdog	Untested
SMBus	Unknown
CAN bus	N/A
CPU frequency scaling	Untested
Other powersaving features	WIP
ACPI	N/A
Reboot	OK
Poweroff	WIP
Suspend	Unknown
Nonstandard LEDs	OK	Controlled by parallel port.
High precision event timers (HPET)	N/A
Random number generator (RNG)	N/A
Wake on modem ring	N/A
Wake on LAN	Untested	Enabled on LOM Design, should work fine but untested.
Wake on keyboard	Untested	Supported by the Super I/O but not implemented.
Wake on mouse	N/A
TPM	Unknown
Flashrom	OK	Should work since flashrom version r3145.

Hardware

Front of Thomson IP1000.	Back of Thomson IP1000.
	Thomson IP1000 Board still in the case.

• Intel 830M northbridge
• Intel 82801DB (ICH4) southbridge
• SMSC LPC47M192 Super I/O
• Firmware Hub (FWH) flash memory
  • Either ST M50FW080 8-Mbit (1Mbx8)
  • Or ST M50FW040 4-Mbit (512Kb x8)
• 64MB PC133 SDRAM on board
• 144 pin SO_DIMM socket
• PCI Slot
• Two USB 2.0 ports
• 2 Ultra-ATA/100/66/33 IDE channels (one connector)
• 64MB Compact Flash via IDE controller (upgradeable)
• Integrated 10/100 Intel 82562ET LAN On Motherboard (LOM)
• Integrated 2D and 3D graphics with AGP 4X interface
• Conexant CX25873-13 High Performance Video Encoder
• Composite and S-Video outputs (can deliver either NTSC or PAL video)

• Optical SPDIF output (Dolby Digital)
• IR receiver for remote / keyboard
• PS/2 Keyboard & Mouse connectors
• 3 LEDs with GPIO control

VGA vs. Headless

Before building coreboot for the RCA RM4100 there are a few settings to consider. Depending on whether you want VGA support or not, you might have to modify some files.

Headless (no VGA)

You have the ability to build a "headless" version of coreboot that will only output to the serial console:

Edit targets/thomson/ip1000/Config.lb and change:

# option ROM_SIZE = 1024 * 1024
option ROM_SIZE = (1024 * 1024) - (64 * 1024)

to

option ROM_SIZE = 1024 * 1024
# option ROM_SIZE = (1024 * 1024) - (64 * 1024)

Also, change:

option CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA = 1
option CONFIG_PCI_ROM_RUN = 1

to

option CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA = 0
option CONFIG_PCI_ROM_RUN = 0 

Change

option CONFIG_VIDEO_MB = 8

to

option CONFIG_VIDEO_MB = 0

VGA

If you do want VGA you can choose how much memory is pre-allocated for VGA. Note: You can still use the serial console when VGA is enabled. Possible options are:

## 0 for No memory pre-allocated (Graphics memory Disabled)
## 512 for DVMT (UMA) mode, 512K of memory pre-allocated for frame buffer
## 1 for DVMT (UMA) mode, 1M of memory pre-allocated for frame buffer
## 8 for DVMT (UMA) mode, 8M of memory pre-allocated for frame buffer

To adjust this edit targets/thomson/ip1000/Config.lb, edit the line

CONFIG_VIDEO_MB = 

and change it to any of the options above. Note: Remember that if you do want VGA you will need the VGA BIOS file (vga.rom).

Payload

Next you will need to prepare a payload. For this tutorial I will use FILO to boot from a hard drive (Fedora Core 7). In the FILO directory run

make

like instructed in the INSTALL directions and then edit the file Config.

Change:

MENULST_FILE = "hda3:/boot/filo/menu.lst"

to (menu.lst is a symlink to grub.conf and FILO does not like that)

MENULST_FILE = "hda1:/grub/grub.conf"

to boot to GRUB on the Compact Flash card or

MENULST_FILE = "hdc1:/grub/grub.conf"

to boot from the harddrive.

Change:

#SERIAL_SPEED = 115200

to

SERIAL_SPEED = 115200

to insure we get output to the serial console. That should be it. Now you can run

make 

again to build your payload ELF file. Once that finishes copy filo.elf to the /tmp directory, or you can adjust targets/thomson/ip1000/Config.lb to point to where filo.elf is.

You can further reduce the size of filo.elf by disabling various unneeded options in FILO's Config file (e.g. support for filesystems you don't use).

Building coreboot

Now we are ready to build coreboot.

$ cd ~/coreboot-v2/targets
$ ./buildtarget thomson/ip1000
$ cd thomson/ip1000/ip1000
$ make

If you're using VGA you need to prepend your video BIOS to the coreboot.rom file. Copy your VGA BIOS file (vga.rom) to the ~/coreboot-v2/targets/thomson/ip1000/ip1000 directory and then:

cat vga.rom coreboot.rom > cboot.rom

Flashing coreboot

At last you're ready to flash cboot.rom to your IP1000. Unfortunately there is not really an easy way to do this. The IP1000 has a PLCC32 socket for the firmware chip so you can take the chip out and use the Hot Flash method or a programmer device. After you have Linux running you can always use flashrom.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible: I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.