My first attempts to boot Linux on the TC15 were not successful. Upping the loglevel to 5 showed error messages such as:
ACPI BIOS Warning (bug): 32/64X length mismatch in FADT/Gpe0Block: 128/32 (20200925/tbfadt-564) ACPI: NMI not connected to LINT 1! ACPI: NMI not connected to LINT 1! ACPI: NMI not connected to LINT 1! ACPI: NMI not connected to LINT 1! ENERGY_PERF_BIAS: Set to 'normal', was 'performance' hpet: number irqs doesn't agree with number of timers Hangcheck: starting hangchecktimer 0.9.1 (tick is 180 seconds, margin is 60 seconds).
I tried disabling the hpet timers in the BIOS and then also using the command line parameter hpet=disable. I managed to reach a point where it eventually (after a long timeout) booted into the graphical desktop but I found I had a non-functional keyboard and mouse.
I recalled a previous instance which I solved by using the command line parameter nolapic. This worked to the extent that Tiny Core Linux (12.0) booted and ran but:
From the dmesg file:
------------[ cut here ]------------ WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1 at 0xc03e0e08 Modules linked in: CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 5.10.3-tinycore #2021 Hardware name: TC15/TC15, BIOS 1.30.06 06/20/2014 .... ------------[ cut here ]------------ WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1 at 0xc03e075d Modules linked in: CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Tainted: G W 5.10.3-tinycore #2021 Hardware name: TC15/TC15, BIOS 1.30.06 06/20/2014 ...... ------------[ cut here ]------------ WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 159 at 0xc03e1334 Modules linked in: igb(+) lpc_ich mei_txe ptp mei pps_core intel_atomisp2_pm CPU: 0 PID: 159 Comm: modprobe Tainted: G W 5.10.3-tinycore #2021 Hardware name: TC15/TC15, BIOS 1.30.06 06/20/2014 ......
Google informed me that (2) was a side effect of using nolapic.
After some more work with Google I stumbled across a solution in the ubuntu forums that appeared back in 2009. Personally I like to understand what is going on but in this instance I haven't a clue. All I know is that if you add the incantation below to the boot command line, Linux (in the form of Tiny Core 12.0), boots and runs as it should:
noapic pci=assign-busses apicmaintainer idle=poll reboot=cold,hard
This is definitely an example of the black arts!
It looks the BIOS in the TC15 is broken but, in view of my earlier research, the opportunity to find a repaired/upgraded BIOS is non existent. You may need to experiment to ensure that your flavour of Linux is running as it should be on the TC15.