Tizen is the OS of everything and we have seen it running on an a All winner tablet, AllWinner A20 Dev board, as well as the Intel NUC, and recently as XBMC running on top of it (Tizen). Now we can add another device / developer board to add to the list, the MinnowBoard MAX!!!
Our colleague Philippe Coval was one of the lucky ones to get his hands on a MinnnowBoard MAX early pre-production units. This is a development board that is powered by Intel’s E3825 CPU (Atom Dual-core 64-bit) and manufactured by CircuitCo. One of the reasons that this is a good target for Tizen, is that it EFI support, and in this case it only supports 64-Bit EFI Bootloaders.
For those that want to flash their boards with Tizen Common, it is recommended that you upgrade the stock firmware ASAP, and you can follow John Hawley’s instructions to unpack 2014-08-13_12-43-09_R75695.zip archive to USB (fat32) disk and then execute update tool from (working) EFI shell :
fs0:\> FirmwareUpdate.efi MNW2_IFWI_X64_R_2014_08_13_1312_SecEnabled.bin
Tizen Time
Now the interesting part of the story begins : Tizen:Common supports MinnowBoard Max without too much effort. First Philippe had to adapt some scripts to generate X86_64 images to ship gummiboot bootloader, then rebuild latest LTSI kernel (v3.14.17) and tweak config file and it’s done, just dump the image to sdcard before typing this single command:
fs0:\EFI\boot\bootx86.efi
Minnowboardmax users (or regular EFI64 system) can download Tizen:Common EFI image for minnowmax : tizen-minnowboardmax-0.0.20140819rzr.img.xz (md5=009cdba2efb649f49e02af1a4aa55d2d). Any feedback from MBM users is appreciated, and also can be directed to Philippe to document the procedure to use or create images until they’re published upstream.
“To conclude this target has good (perfect?) Tizen support and it is worth considering for those who care about freedom, since it complies with Open Source Hardware Association’s requirements and design files are planned to be available under Copyleft license (CC-BY-SA). Don’t forget about the communities behind or related to it (ELinux, Yocto and now Tizen), let me thank for support specially prpplague and warthog9 from #MinnowBoard too” – Phillipe Coval
Video
For further information, and information on how to resurrect a bricked MinnowBoard Max board, then please visit the Eurogiciel website.
