openSUSE:Genesi

Overview

Genesi is a hardware manufacturer and reseller of Power and ARM Architecture desktop and embedded systems, based in Washington, DC.

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 and Freescale BSP packages developed for systems based on the Freescale/NXP MPC5121E, MPC5123 and MPC5125.

All Genesi PowerPC 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;

EFIKA MX

Efika MX is based on the Freescale/NXP iMX515, a low power ARM SoC platform. Two consumer products are available: Efika MX Smarttop and Efika MX Smartbook, both assembled around the 800MHz Freescale/NXP i.MX515 CPU. A newer version Efika MX, based on the iMX53 SoC is produced (December 2012) by Genesi licensee for Mexico, [ETTO]. The board was also licensed for Brazil (Positivo) and China (FIC and Pegatron). The board has an LVDS output and is suitable for both embedded applications as well as a Smartbook and Tablet.

There is now a bootable SD card image available for Efika MX machines with a minimal openSUSE factory installation: http://lizards.opensuse.org/2012/01/21/opensuse-arm-image/ This is an earlier stage of openSUSE development and uses the Genesi kernel, which is old, but supports video output. [openSUSE 12.2] release and [factory] are both available but have only serial port support, as these images use the current upstream kernel and the video drivers are not upstream yet.

MPC5121e/MPC5123

Board support for the Freescale/NXP MPC512X processor series was developed for both generic MPC5121e designs and the MPC5123 Starter Kit. Support for the development board (MPC5121eADS revisions 3.2 and above) was tested using the 11.0, 11.1 release and Factory. Freescale/NXP discontinued this SoC before it moved into volume production.

Efika 5200B

Efika 5200B is based on the Freescale/NXP 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.

THTF (China) licensed the Efika design for 1 million units, but never achieved this volume.

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

PegasosPPC and Open Desktop Workstation

PegasosPPC is a high-performance, low-power Power Architecture G3 (IBM 750cxe) and G4 (Freescale/NXP 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.