Gigabyte Intros Bay Trail J1800 Based Mini-ITX Board

kenmasterson

I built a J1900-based pfSense box, only to find that pfSense has issue with Bay Trail processors that prevents it from booting properly: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/3678

I hope that this will save someone else from having the same trouble, or encourage the issue to get resolved.

sdl007

Hi Everyone

I just got a Gigabyte J1900N-D3V motherboard and booted off my trusty pfSense memory stick. Only to be presented with the dreaded "Bogus Interrupt Trigger Mode" message.
After looking around the interweb and trying different things, I found this to work for me.
Update the bios to F3 (came shipped with F2)
I re-imaged my trusty pfSense memory stick with "pfSense-memstick-2.1.3-RELEASE-amd64-20140501-1552.img" just to be sure.

Installed first time, no errors.

Here is the strange bit. If I do a 5) Reboot system, it boots back every time.
If I do a 6) Halt system, she will error out with this error once I hit the power button to start up again.
panic: Bogus Interrupt Polarity
Now at this stage, I hit the reset button on the box (as opposed to powering off) and it will boot.
Just seems to be an issue when starting the box from a fully shutdown state.

weird or what? 2 parts of annoying I might add.

stephenw10

As linked to in kenmasterson's bug report this is a BIOS bug in the form of a bad ACPI table, I guess Gigabyte didn't fix all the problems with F3. Get on them with your error, you never know they might actually fix it in F4. ;)

Steve

kenmasterson

@stephenw10:

As linked to in kenmasterson's bug report this is a BIOS bug in the form of a bad ACPI table, I guess Gigabyte didn't fix all the problems with F3. Get on them with your error, you never know they might actually fix it in F4. ;)

Steve

Let's hope so. I'm reporting the issue to Asrock, too.

stephenw10

Better than not booting at all! ;)
You may be able to prevent the hang at halt problem by disabling suspend/low sleep states in the BIOS.

Steve

paulsnoop

@kenmasterson:

@stephenw10:

As linked to in kenmasterson's bug report this is a BIOS bug in the form of a bad ACPI table, I guess Gigabyte didn't fix all the problems with F3. Get on them with your error, you never know they might actually fix it in F4. ;)

Steve

Let's hope so. I'm reporting the issue to Asrock, too.

I have done the same for my Q1900M, although I'm not expecting too much from them.

Does anyone have any advice, is there some BIOS settings I could try?

stephenw10

So you have the Asrock Q1900M? And it's failing to boot showing the 'interrupt trigger' error?

Make sure you're running the most recent BIOS. Try disabling ACPI features in the BIOS.

Steve

paulsnoop

Hi Steve, thanks for the reply.

@stephenw10:

So you have the Asrock Q1900M? And it's failing to boot showing the 'interrupt trigger' error?

Yes I have the Q1900M, error is 'bogus interrupt polarity'.

@stephenw10:

Make sure you're running the most recent BIOS. Try disabling ACPI features in the BIOS.

BIOS is the latest (1.30). Here is what I have tried so far:
CPU
Disabled Speedstep
Disabled C States
Disabled Enhanced Halt (C1E)

Chipset
GPU memory to 64mb
Disabled IGPU
Disabled Onboard Audio
Disabled S5 Sleep

Various submenus
ACHI mode
Disabled Intel Smartconnect
Disabled Serial port
Disabled Parallel port

ACPI menu
Disabled suspend to RAM
Enabled ACPI HPET table
Disabled all power on (keyboard, LAN etc)

Boot menu
CSM Enabled
Legacy mode OpROM policy for PXE, Storage, Video

stephenw10

Hmm, well 3 options I see:
1: Fix the bios yourself. Might not be that tough but it's risky.
2: Run a hypervisor and run pfSense as a VM.
3. Wait for Asrock to fix it. Could be a loooooooong time!

I did also look into the possibility of overriding the faulty table at boot. You can do that with the DSDT table but I'm not sure about the MADT.
The actual patch to FreeBSD required to workaround this is small but appears to have gone in only on Jun 23 this year so will not have made it into 10-rel and hence pfSense 2.2.
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=187966

Steve

Edit: typos

paulsnoop

Thanks for the tips Steve. As VMWare also has problems with this CPU, I suspect I'll end up going with Hyper-V.

notar

Good morning
I have a q1900M motherborard with two intel nics pro/100 and, this morning, i have finish the router with pfsense. When i load pfsense and i select 1 in the menu, i have the same problem with ACPI but, when i select 2 in the menu, all work fine and install go fine. I am just a problem with the route. Sorry for my English, i have French.

stephenw10

So you can boot if you select 'ACPI disabled'?
You can make that permanent by adding the line in /boot/loader.conf.local. See:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Booting_Options#pfSense_2.0

Steve

notar

@stephenw10:

So you can boot if you select 'ACPI disabled'?
You can make that permanent by adding the line /boot/loader.conf.local. See:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Booting_Options#pfSense_2.0

Steve

Good morning
Yes, i can boot with ACPI disable. Thanks for the tip. Notar
PS : I can't install amd64, it bug. I have installed the i386

notar

Good morning
I have tested the pfsense 2.2 alpha and it work fine with acpi enable. Just the dns seem don't work and it is necessary to put a dns in network config. Why this, i don' know. Notar

stephenw10

2.2 is still in alpha. A new DNS forwarder is being used and I guess a bug was introduced while things are being ironed out.

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=78356.0

Steve

elbob

Hi,

Long time pfsense user but this is my first post here.

I just want to add to this thread by saying I recently bought a J1900-D3V board. I got around to assembling it yesterday and came across the same issues others were having.

However I did try a trick that was suggested above that worked. On cold boot I get the Interrupt Trigger error. However If I press the reset switch it will boot up with no issues.

I've installed 2.1.4 64bit.

Hopefully this workaround will help someone until a more permanent fix is available from Gigabyte or BSD kernel workaround.

I forgot to mention that I'm using the F3 version of the BIOS and I also disabled all the UFI stuff so everything in the Advanced –> CSM configuration section of the BIOS is set to Legacy.

molle

Here is a patch for FreeBSD 8.3 64 Bit, its just a backport of the patch from the bugreport.

Somehow i can't login into the bugtracker, just posting it here for interested people.

https://gist.github.com/cHolzberger/419d214d3c16ae2a8f25

stephenw10

Interesting. Is it possible to add that as a module or does it require a complete kernel rebuild?

Steve

molle

it requires a new kernel to be build.
wont work that great with updates…

i just sent the patch to the dev@ mailinglist. perhaps it gets included in next stable?

AveryFreeman

I have a pfSense build I made with a Lenovo H100s motherboard (j1800) that I bought off ebay for $15 and a Pro 1000 VT quad NIC, and a couple Intel SLC SSDs in a gmirror, running 2.3.3_1 bare metal.

I can confirm that the bay trail processor works great with 2.3.3. Iperf over 900mbs across local network, rarely goes above 30% CPU with OpenVPN tunnel running concurrently.