New Alix board for 2013

dolomite792

So is this board worth buying yet? Will the recommended wifi card work properly? Or should I say would I have to wrestle with it for hours via command line getting it to work with band aid fixes? (I read that pfsense doesn't work with N mode wifi signal or freebsd I should say) Are there any alternatives for it also? Also does that heat sink that I saw in some other photos come with the motherboard kit and thermal paste when you purchase it? I saw that there is a sata port on the board also, does anyone know where you could plug in a sata power cable on the board and what type of connector you would need to buy say if you wanted to use a large 2.5 inch hard drive?

I am really excited to get started with pfsense for home use (and maybe more) and I would like to use snort and squid squid guard etc. It looks like this board would be a great low/hassle low power solution to achieving this that is unless anyone believes there to be many obstacles with it yet.

MaxPF

@dolomite792:

So is this board worth buying yet? Will the recommended wifi card work properly? Or should I say would I have to wrestle with it for hours via command line getting it to work with band aid fixes? (I read that pfsense doesn't work with N mode wifi signal or freebsd I should say) Are there any alternatives for it also? Also does that heat sink that I saw in some other photos come with the motherboard kit and thermal paste when you purchase it? I saw that there is a sata port on the board also, does anyone know where you could plug in a sata power cable on the board and what type of connector you would need to buy say if you wanted to use a large 2.5 inch hard drive?

I am really excited to get started with pfsense for home use (and maybe more) and I would like to use snort and squid squid guard etc. It looks like this board would be a great low/hassle low power solution to achieving this that is unless anyone believes there to be many obstacles with it yet.

As far as I know the wifi card is currently not supported in 2.1 and 2.1.1, but it should work in 2.2. The heat spreader is included with the board. The website says "1 SATA + power connector" so I assume that one of the headers on the board can be used for that.

tmueko

I just testet the new APU-Board from PC-Engines and I am very disappointed:

Network performance is very poor, below 15MB/sec scp from host to /dev/null

aes-128 is about 2% of Alix as Hardware-Crypto ist missing!

using: "openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc -mr"

|

| | 16 bytes | 64 bytes | 256 bytes | 1024 bytes | 8192 bytes |
| apu(i386) | 17647920.62 | 19119871.30 | 19119871.30 | 19856786.89 | 19884175.64 |
| apu(amd64) | 31838188.68 | 33707485.47 | 35294343.25 | 36019144.06 | 36141132.37 |
| alix(glxb) | 9330604.35 | 51383196.64 | 228813355.80 | 571595559.02 | 21593993900.75 |
| hifn799(miniPCI) | 29525399.38 | 88806702.25 | 455857889.95 | 1052874486.91 | 20549906447.53 |

So, for <= 100MBit, use Alix; for >= 100Mbit, use other Hardware (Intel-Chipset) and Hardware-Encrytion.

Just my 5 ct. |

forbiddenlake

@MaxPF:

Just when I decided to go with the 2GB model instead of waiting for the 4GB, it sold out.

what country are you in? Check their other distributors. I just ordered an APU1C from mini-box.com (free US shipping!).

stephenw10

@tmueko:

Network performance is very poor, below 15MB/sec scp from host to /dev/null

Why use SCP? That's testing crypto and network in combination. Hardly a fair test unless you're running that specifically.

Steve

watercooled

Add -elapsed to that openssl command to measure elapsed time, rather than CPU time. As the code doesn't run on the CPU with the hardware test, you get massively inaccurate results. Just think about the results for a second - ~20GB/s throughput?

This is more the sort of result you should be getting with -elapsed: http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/index.front?-tags=geode

tmueko

I aslo tried to just use the APU as Gbit-Gateway with the ame bad results.

Using the "-elapsed" Option gives complete different results!

APU
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc 25906.20k 27743.31k 28145.80k 28552.07k 28663.62k
aes-128-cbc 31903.42k 34736.06k 35349.14k 35994.51k 36190.80k

ALIX
aes-128-cbc 439.80k 1711.46k 5388.38k 15939.21k 28228.88k
aes-256-cbc 3880.35k 4004.79k 4381.44k 4132.74k 4014.75k

NA820(hifn)
aes-128-cbc 617.01k 2462.52k 7257.86k 13492.76k 21152.43k
aes-256-cbc 616.61k 2412.38k 7626.04k 15504.02k 23657.20k

I think I'll try to find a bottleneck … maybe a brocken cable...

watercooled

Do you have a way of measuring idle/load power consumption?

Also, what's the thermal solution like? Retailers I've checked say it comes with an aluminium heat spreader, but don't go into much detail about how the system works.

For example, does the heat spreader come bonded to the processor die somehow and contact the enclosure via some thermal paste?

Edit: NVM, I've just found this page, linked by a retailer: http://www.pcengines.ch/apucool.htm

Edit2: connorxxl beat me to it. :P

connorxxl

See http://www.pcengines.ch/apucool.htm.

Anaximelis

Power consumption on apu1c with ssd + wifi card is 9.5 watt Idee / 13 watt load

Guest

@olivier:

Here is a network performance bench of the APU1c (2Go of RAM) under FreeBSD 11-current.

It's going to be a while before we run 11 under pfSense.

Guest

@Clown:

Would be nice to have for the new APU board:

LED Support

working
@Clown:

Thermal sensors

working, but won't be enabled by default. Can be enabled via 'Advanced' menu.
@Clown:

as mentioned in an other thread (GPU prozessors as crypto device)

not even going to bother, (as mentioned in other thread)

router_wang

Gonzo, what is the current and roadmap for Wifi cards that I can use with this board?

connorxxl

Gonzo, any hints about how to enable thermal sensors? I tried the advanced settings (AMD K8, K10, etc.), but no temperature… At least not in the Thermal Sensors Dashboard...

Thanks for your help.

nesense

@gonzopancho:

@Clown:

Would be nice to have for the new APU board:

LED Support

working
@Clown:

Thermal sensors

working, but won't be enabled by default. Can be enabled via 'Advanced' menu.
@Clown:

as mentioned in an other thread (GPU prozessors as crypto device)

not even going to bother, (as mentioned in other thread)

BlinkLED does not work with the APU board:

"Mar 22 01:06:49 php: /pkg_edit.php: The command '/usr/local/bin/blinkled -i 're2' -l '/dev/led/led2'' returned exit code '2', the output was '/usr/local/bin/blinkled: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected'
Mar 22 01:06:49 php: /pkg_edit.php: The command '/usr/local/bin/blinkled -i 're1' -l '/dev/led/led3'' returned exit code '2', the output was '/usr/local/bin/blinkled: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected'"

Same for thermal Sensors, ACPI or amdtemp both do not show temperatures.

stephenw10

Clearly that's not going to be for 2.1 since the board has only recently become available. At the very least it would be a 2.1.1 build but more likely he is referencing a 2.2 build.

Steve

tmueko

Can somebody measure throughput on his APU?

I startet a "nc -l 8888 > /dev/null" on a device on WAN Interface.
then I startet "cat <big file="">| nc <ip_from_device>8888"

I dont get more then 10 MByte/s.

What am I doing wrong?</ip_from_device></big>

tirsojrp

Testing with a 100Mbps equipment?

tohil

hi

i tried to install the embedded version on a 4GB Kingston SD Card. but it doesn't fit, so i used the 2GB nanobsd edition.
but when i try to boot, i got errors about mounting the root parition, wrong geometry aborting startup

can i fix this by this
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Soekris_6501_USB_Flash_installation#Root_Mount_error

or the USB Boot Problem article?

0x55

@tmueko:

Can somebody measure throughput on his APU?

I startet a "nc -l 8888 > /dev/null" on a device on WAN Interface.
then I startet "cat <big file="">| nc <ip_from_device>8888"

I dont get more then 10 MByte/s.

What am I doing wrong?</ip_from_device></big>

<big file="">Using Debian Wheezy 64bit, 'nc hera 7777
root@hera:/# netcat -l -p 7777 | dd of=/dev/null bs=1024
8503772+19682 records in
8513324+0 records out
4358821888 bytes (4.4 GB) copied, 45.7555 s, 95.3 MB/s

Pretty close to the theoretical maximum of 1 GBit when considering TCP/IP overhead, however the CPU is nearly at max (90-95%, 1 core), so the APU can cope with the GBit traffic, but is stressed to the limit in this simple test.
When doing packet forwarding solely in kernel space (without user space processes and thus a lot less context switches/copy operations) the CPU should be able to handle the traffic with ease. Didn't test throughput with smaller, sub-MTU packets though, this should stress the CPU a lot more.

Overall a huge improvement over the good old ALIX (had 2 ALIX, now 2 APUs), crypto could be a little faster (~ 30MB/s AES128 CTR + umac128 when doing a simple cat /dev/zero test via SSH connection, compression (obvioulsy) turned off), but since the APU does not have an onboard hardware crypto engine, that's ok in my opinion :)</big>