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Devon IT TC15: Linux 

Linux

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:

  1. The dmesg output showed three processes had crashed during the boot process.
  2. The running system was only using a single CPU core, the other three were ignored.

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.

 


Any comments? email me. Added April 2022