VIA EN12000EG

Features

• Processor

1.2GHz Via C7 Fanless

• Chipset

VIA CN700 North Bridge - Unichrome Pro

VIA VT8237R Series South Bridge - VT1618 AC97 Audio

• OnBoard

1 x PCI slots

1 x DDR2 400/533 DIMM Socket (upto 1Gb)

2 x UDMA 133, 2 x S-ATA

• Ports

S-Video out, RCA out, 10/100/1000 lan, 4 x USB2, 3 x Audio, VGA, Mouse, Keyboard, Serial

Manufacturers Page: Via EN Series Mini-ITX Mainboards

Issues

This board is not able to support hdtv out - the maximum TV-Out resolution is 1024x1024 otherwise it makes a perfectly reasonable quiet, low power(12-14W) frontend and/or backend. This note captures a working configuration because it took me longer than I expected to get it running using a HVR900 USB tuner.

Configuration

• Check dmesg on boot - the default/fail-safe default settings leave the board at 400MHz. Use Load Optimised Defaults in the BIOS to get 1200MHz

Note: The C7 processor is capable of using the kernel's cpufreq subsystem to alter the clock speed. Enable "CPU Frequency scaling", "userspace" governor and "C7 Enhanced PowerSaver" drivers in the "Power management" section of the kernel config (governors not properly selected in .config listed below). Can be used with Powernowd.

• Working configuration:

MythTV 0.20.2 (SVN 14300)

Linux 2.6.22.6

I Needed binutils 2.18 to get round a 'File Truncated' / 'make: *** [bzImage] Error 2' when make install was trying to compress vmlinux.bin to make bzImage

Working .config file VIA_EN12000EG_linux_config

Xorg 7.3

This needs libdrm built and also needs libxcb to have relaxed locking - the libxcb sloppy_lock patch [1] does not work with my Qt 3.3.4 (The lock assertion fires - I just removed the assertions to get it to work.)

My xorg.conf for UK PAL VIA_EN12000EG_xorg.conf - generated new and supplemented by guidance in [2]

Unichrome SVN 396

Following the Unichrome wiki [3] - my X11 was in /usr/X11R6 so my prefix was /usr/X11R6

Marcus Rechberger's Em2880 drivers - for the HVR900 card (A1C0) following [4]

• This configuration runs at 75-78% idle watching S-Video out TV as a combined frontend/backend and 82-88% idle watching remote recordings. Enabling Bob*2 deinterlace takes 5-15% additional cpu.