Genesi

From openSUSE

Overview

Genesi is a hardware manufacturer and reseller of Power and ARM Architecture desktop and embedded systems, based in San Antonio, Texas.

openSUSE supports several Genesi products, including the PegasosPPC motherboard, and the PegasosPPC-based Open Desktop Workstation (ODW, as of 10.1), the Efika 5200B (as of 10.2, greatly improved in 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1) and support is being developed for several in-progress systems based on the Freescale MPC5121E, MPC5123 and MPC8610.

All Genesi systems ship with OpenFirmware-compatible firmware, similar to that in Power Architecture Macs and servers. This allows booting without elaborate bootloaders such as Yaboot or GRUB, however there are some caveats.

Following is a summary of articles for Genesi systems;

PegasosPPC and Open Desktop Workstation

PegasosPPC is a high-performance, low-power Power Architecture G3 (IBM 750cxe) and G4 (Freescale MPC7447, MPC7447A) motherboard with pluggable CPU modules. PegasosPPC came in two major revisions, the Pegasos I and Pegasos II - no support exists for the Pegasos I, these pages refer solely to the Pegasos II (revision 2B1 and above). The Open Desktop Workstation is a complete system based on Pegasos II 2B3 and 2B5 revisions, with RAM, Hard Disk, DVD burner, and went through several revisions.

Support for the Pegasos began in OpenSUSE 10.1 and was greatly improved for 10.2, 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1.

• Pegasos installation instructions
• Booting_on_Pegasos (relevant for all versions)

Efika 5200B

Efika 5200B is based on the Freescale MPC5200B, a low-power 400MHz SoC platform for automotive markets. With 128MB of RAM, running a full desktop openSUSE is difficult but not impossible, and with the right selection of packages (Xfce or a lightly configured KDE instead of GNOME) can make a reasonable desktop system. Support for the Efika was implemented in openSUSE 10.2 and greatly improved in 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1

• Efika (10.2 and quirks for 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1)

MPC5121e/MPC5123

Board support for the Freescale MPC512X processor series is being developed for both generic MPC5121e designs and the MPC5123 Starter Kit. Support for the development board (MPC5121eADS revisions 3.2 and above) is being tested using the 11.0, 11.1 release and Factory.

• MPC5121eADS

MPC8610 & MPC8641D

An Efika design around the Freescale MPC8610 is being developed. In lieu of actual prototype hardware, support for the development board (MPC8610ADS) is being tested using 11.0, 11.1 release and Factory. Support for the MPC8641D dual-core processor from Freescale is included in this documentation as the chips are very similar.

• MPC8610

EFIKA MX Developer Edition

Efika MX is based on the Freescale iMX515, a low power ARM SoC platform. OpenSUSE is being ported to the ARM architecture right now, and the base system was already ran successfully on an EFIKA MX Developer Edition board.