PCEngines APU board with pfsense setup

forbiddenlake

I have one also, and as I understand it:

For example: PowerD, should I be using this for power savings?

Yes

Cryptogrpahic hardware, does this APU support toe AMD Geode functions?

No

Thermal sensors? What is the correct setting?

Have to wait for pfSense 2.2 for this support

bluebsh

What's your throughput like on yours? Mine seems to be working nicely with my 110Mbit connection to my ISP.

forbiddenlake

I can max out my 25/5 Mbps plan (no VPN).

bluebsh

anyone have any settings to change or optimizations they know of for this board for pfSense?

bennyc

Turn it upside-down… (heat gets dissipated better ;D)
Other than that, what are you looking for? Do you have things that are not working fast enough, or issues? (other than the temperature sensor, but that seems a driver limitation in 2.1.x)

If it ain't broken, don't fix it... ;)

bluebsh

well, for starters….

This has three Realtek RTL8111E chips on it. The chips themselves support hardware checksum offload, TCP segmentation offload and large receive offload. However, I don't know if the current driver it's using supports that... so what are the best settings for this?

bennyc

Not much info on that (from my part).

Changing those settings only "offloads" the cpu from doing those tasks I think. I would only tweak that if I should encounter issues or suspect performance issues.
As in my situation I haven't seen much cpu usage anyway, I see no need to change the default settings from pfSense.
(For now, the apu can deliver more throughput than my ISP (120/6), and my OpenVPN's max out on upload speed, not on the apu's limitations….)

As your usage might differ from mine, my best advice would be to test it and see if you can gain anything... (to be found here: System: Advanced: Networking -> section "Network Interfaces")

hrts

Hi,
I saw in a large number of posts that I need to edit /boot/loader.conf.local and add kern.cam.boot_delay=10000 in it.

Can somebody help me how to do this in this situation:
1. while i get this messages: /boot/loader.conf.local does not exist
2. Trying to create it with following command gives me an read only file system message

[2.1.3-RELEASE][root@pfsense]/boot(18): echo kern.cam.boot_delay=10000 > /boot/loader.conf.local
/boot/loader.conf.local: Read-only file system.

3. same message if I try to copy an existing conf file and later to modify it

[2.1.3-RELEASE][root@pfsense]/boot(22): cp loader.conf loader.conf.local
cp: loader.conf.local: Read-only file system

Is it ok if I add the line kern.cam.boot_delay=10000 inside loader.conf ?
Or should I add it in the loader.conf_wrap ?

And another one: I need 115200 baud rade for serial console (my APU start with this peed).
Is it ok to add the line comconsole_speed="115200" in the loader.conf?
Thank you!

stephenw10

If you're running Nano the filesystem is, by default, read-only. Re-mount it as read-write before you edit or add files. You can do that from the Diagnostics: NanoBSD: menu in the webgui or from the CLI:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Remount_embedded_filesystem_as_read-write

You should use loader.conf.local for any modifications you make. However that setting is required to allow the box to boot from media that requires a slight delay, since your box is clearly already booted why are you adding it?

You can set the console speed in the webgui in System: Advanced: Admin Access:

Steve

hrts

Hi Steve,
Thank you!

Yes, the box (it is indeed NANO) is booted. I did that by stopping the boot sequence and giving the following commands:
set kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
boot

I wanted to make this setting permanent.
Anyway: I modified the loader.conf file: so it is permanent ;D
Same for the console: I've added the line in loader.conf file.

This web GUI is not so easy - so I prefer to use my Linux knowledge and change the conf files.

Again, thank you!

Now I know what I've missed when I've tried to create the loader.conf.local file!