New Alix board for 2013

[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>

[tmueko]

@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?

Yes, that are the steps, you have to go, but 'set kern.cam.boot_delay="5000"'  will be enough.

[forbiddenlake]

Is there a way to speed up crypto? Like a Mini-PCI crypto accelerator?

[doktornotor]

@forbiddenlake:

Like a Mini-PCI crypto accelerator?

No such slot on the board.

[forbiddenlake]

@doktornotor:

No such slot on the board.

?

http://pcengines.ch/apu1c.htm

"Expansion: 2 miniPCI express (one with SIM socket)"

"Use with …
wle200nx miniPCI express wireless module"

Looks like it does to me?

[tirsojrp]

MiniPCI Express not just MiniPCI

Use Google

[tmueko]

I just tracked down my performance-problem with the APU: It is a problem with the realtek-chipset on freebsd! That Device is unusable with pfSense yet:

The same APU, one time bootet with ipfire, one time with pfSense:

ipfire(linux):
[root@ipfire ~]# iperf -c 192.168.0.67 -p 1000
–----------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.67, TCP port 1000
TCP window size: 21.0 KByte (default)

[  3] local 192.168.0.7 port 32863 connected with 192.168.0.67 port 1000
[ ID] Interval      Transfer    Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  667 MBytes  559 Mbits/sec

pfSense-2.1(FreeBSD-8.3)
[2.1-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(14): iperf -c 192.168.0.67 -p 1000
–----------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.67, TCP port 1000
TCP window size: 65.0 KByte (default)

[  3] local 192.168.0.121 port 9760 connected with 192.168.0.67 port 1000
[ ID] Interval      Transfer    Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 2.7 sec  8.62 MBytes  26.4 Mbits/sec

I'll try to build a NanoBSD-Image from 10.0 …

[tohil]

@tmueko:

@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?

Yes, that are the steps, you have to go, but 'set kern.cam.boot_delay="5000"'  will be enough.

Thanks for your reply. Will this maybe added to the nanobsd image as default? also the automatic mapping of the new APU interfaces re0 re1 re2?

I used now the normal installer from a usb stick. i installed the embedded kernel and set a ramdisk for /tmp and /var in the webconfigurator. is this enough, that my SD card will not die in a few weeks or have i better to reinstall the whole boxes with the embedded edition?

regards angelo

[stephenw10]

What makes you think that it's the Realtek driver rather than something else? I'm fully prepare to believe it might be but just curious as to your thinking.
Also your window size is not consistent between those tests so the numbers are not directly comparable. Though the larger window in pfSense should be favourable.

It's better to run Nano on flash media.

Steve

[Oliver_]

@ tmueko

Nice test! would be interesting to test with freebsd 10, hoping the troughput is increasing!