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    New Alix board for 2013

    Hardware
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    • nesenseN
      nesense
      last edited by

      @stephenw10:

      How are you testing that? A throughput test is what's needed, iperf running on two separate machine not on the pfSense box.
      326Mbps seems disappointingly slow.  :-\

      Steve

      i'm running iperf server on pfsense and client directly connected to it through 1gbit ethernet macbook port

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        Ah, well not test that really gives a useful figure because that doesn't represent a normal firewall/routing situation. You need to run the server on a separate machine connected to a different interface to get a useful comparable figure.

        Steve

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        • nesenseN
          nesense
          last edited by

          @stephenw10:

          Ah, well not test that really gives a useful figure because that doesn't represent a normal firewall/routing situation. You need to run the server on a separate machine connected to a different interface to get a useful comparable figure.

          Steve

          you mean put a switch for example between pfsense running on APU board and the laptop instead of pfsense <–> laptop?

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          • A
            athurdent
            last edited by

            Nesense, thanks for your efforts!
            A good test scenario would be something like this I think:

            [Laptop (192.168.10.10)] - [LAN Interface (192.168.10.1) - ALIX - WAN Interface (1.1.1.1)] - [iperf server (1.1.1.2)]
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            • nesenseN
              nesense
              last edited by

              @athurdent:

              Nesense, thanks for your efforts!
              A good test scenario would be something like this I think:

              [Laptop (192.168.10.10)] - [LAN Interface (192.168.10.1) - ALIX - WAN Interface (1.1.1.1)] - [iperf server (1.1.1.2)]

              No problem, I'm interested to know how well it performs too  ;D

              Sadly I can't do such a test right now since my WAN interface is running on 100MBIT and my other computer has its monitor at repair, i'll try to borrow a second laptop or something to do throughput tests ASAP.

              BTW the thermal sensors aren't working.

              Any idea how I can get the WLE200NX wifi card to work on pfsense? it uses the AR9280 Atheros chipset, there's this thread http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=55403.0 that mentions FreeBSD 9.x drivers working with it and that they're already on pfsense 2.1 but i'm still having issues.

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              • nesenseN
                nesense
                last edited by

                here's a picture of the board:

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                • W
                  watercooled
                  last edited by

                  Do you have some way to measure power consumption of the board?

                  For comparison, I measured the 2D13 at 3W AC idle through a reasonably efficient 12V power supply. Although IIRC it didn't change under load either, my meter doesn't have decimal resolution.

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                  • nesenseN
                    nesense
                    last edited by

                    @watercooled:

                    Do you have some way to measure power consumption of the board?

                    For comparison, I measured the 2D13 at 3W AC idle through a reasonably efficient 12V power supply. Although IIRC it didn't change under load either, my meter doesn't have decimal resolution.

                    Document says 6 to 12W depending on CPU load. This is using the T40N CPU with a 9W TDP. plan is to change to T40E with a 6W TDP.

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                    • W
                      watercooled
                      last edited by

                      The documentation claims about 5W DC for the existing Geode platform though, and I measured lower than that AC, so I was wondering if measured power could again be lower.

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        Some of those plug-in power meters claim an amazing accuracy. However if you look at the cost if genuinely accurate power meters it's hard to believe. That's especially true for switching power supplies. It wouldn't surprise me to find they misread by a few Watts at very low power levels.

                        Steve

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                        • nesenseN
                          nesense
                          last edited by

                          BTW it also states that PoE is not supported and never will for the APU board.

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                          • W
                            watercooled
                            last edited by

                            @stephenw10:

                            Some of those plug-in power meters claim an amazing accuracy. However if you look at the cost if genuinely accurate power meters it's hard to believe. That's especially true for switching power supplies. It wouldn't surprise me to find they misread by a few Watts at very low power levels.

                            Steve

                            I've found mine to be reasonably accurate (it's not a cheap one), allowing for rounding without any decimals of course, and it does account for PF for instance. But I will try to get around to measuring DC draw.

                            It's not like consumer meters are £1000 worth of kit either.

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                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              Well exactly. My meter was ~£30 and seems to work OK. It measures Watts and VA so I guess it allows for powerfactor but it's clearly not true RMS so I doubt it reads 'spiky' waveforms too well. I still use it though because it gives me a good idea of what's drawing power and if I reduce that. Just keep in mind that real power meters that have 0.01% accuracy are, as you say, many thousands of £/$.

                              Anyway 6W is low enough for me.  :)

                              Steve

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                              • W
                                watercooled
                                last edited by

                                OK here are some DC measurements from my 2D13 for comparison.

                                Voltage set at 12.0V
                                Idle: 0.28A 3.36W
                                ~60Mb/s download (speedtest): 0.34A 4.08W
                                Max CPU, achieved with

                                dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null

                                or burnMMX: fluctuating between 0.37 and 0.39A 4.44-4.68W

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                                • stephenw10S
                                  stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                  last edited by

                                  Nice.  :)
                                  I'm certainly prepared to believe those measurements, assuming the psu holds 12V well enough.  ;)

                                  How many Watts do you think are lost in the PSU, it's efficiency?
                                  Given the small variation in power, 5W max, perhaps the supplied psu is still highly efficient at 3.36W.
                                  Pure speculation time: I would expect to see perhaps 0.25-0.5W loss in the PSU in which case I would hope an AC side power meter should read 4W (if it doesn't display fractions of a Watt).

                                  User phil.davis could tell us a lot about the power consumption of the old Alix board since a lot of his sites are solar powered.

                                  Steve

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                                  • W
                                    watercooled
                                    last edited by

                                    Yeah I was using a bench power supply and double-checked voltage and current with a couple of multimeters.

                                    The PSU I normally use, and did the AC measurements with, is a 60W FSP one which I also use to supply some other network kit (I've also measured with some 12W PSUs with the same results IIRC). It's efficiency level V so >87% average efficiency, although the points for that average are measured at 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent load, so it may not be that efficient at <10% load.

                                    Either way, you're likely correct the AC meter should be displaying 4W. The resolution isn't ideal for measuring this low TBF, but it's ballpark accurate at least. Even being less than half a Watt out and clipping the decimals rather than rounding up could explain why it displays 3.

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                                    • nesenseN
                                      nesense
                                      last edited by

                                      I ran iperf again, this time using two computers connected to the board on individual port, all running 1000baseT, iperf server on a windows 8.1 box, and client on macbook laptop running os x 10.7.5, only running squid on pfsense 2.1, here are the results:

                                      –----------------------------------------------------------
                                      Server listening on TCP port 5001
                                      TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)

                                      [  4] local 192.168.10.11 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.11 port 49272
                                      [  4]  0.0-10.0 sec  539 MBytes  452 Mbits/sec

                                      Using netio:

                                      NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.32
                                      (C) 1997-2012 Kai Uwe Rommel

                                      UDP server listening.
                                      TCP server listening.
                                      UDP connection established …
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  1k ...  21.98 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  1k ...  184.75 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  2k ...  4.16 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  2k ...  263.60 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  4k ...  0 Byte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  4k ...  428.63 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  8k ...  403.75 KByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  8k ...  567.76 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size 16k ...  203.54 KByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size 16k ...  746.44 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size 32k ...  0 Byte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size 32k ...  913.70 MByte/s
                                      Done.

                                      TCP connection established …
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  1k ...  28.91 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  1k ...  30.98 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  2k ...  23.72 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  2k ...  23.23 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  4k ...  33.43 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  4k ...  43.70 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size  8k ...  23.25 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size  8k ...  46.61 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size 16k ...  31.16 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size 16k ...  47.44 MByte/s
                                      Receiving from client, packet size 32k ...  14.18 MByte/s
                                      Sending to client, packet size 32k ...  47.83 MByte/s
                                      Done.

                                      Looks like I need something other than the crappy Macbook to test with  :-\

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                                      • stephenw10S
                                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                        last edited by

                                        Nice!  :)
                                        If you run 'top -SH' on the apu board what does the cpu usage look like during that test?

                                        Not sure how netio is measuring that udp speed but most of those numbers are far higher than you could get down a gigabit connection so it looks like it's buffering somewhere.

                                        Steve

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                                        • W
                                          watercooled
                                          last edited by

                                          It's the UDP transmit speed, but of course most of that won't make it on to the wire, so it's essentially irrelevant. The receive speeds are what you'd want to look at, but it seems something is up with the testing as they're zero, or close to it, on most of the runs.

                                          Edit: I've just tried the UDP benchmark myself and it never reported above roughly 113MB/s, so it seems it works a bit differently than I thought, and something's up with the above benchmark.

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                                          • C
                                            Criggie
                                            last edited by

                                            FYI I've just finished doing iperf testing on an older alix 2d2.
                                            Sadly I did not take power usage measurements while testing.

                                            Full results at: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,70911.0.html

                                            Short version, okay for up to 50 Mbit, can do up to 95 Mbit but you're wringing the nuts off there.

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