PC Engines apu2 experiences

VAMike

@kevindd992002:

Any ideas why I'm getting a board mismatch error:

Calibrating delay loop… delay loop is unreliable, trying to continue OK.
coreboot table found at 0xdffae000.
Found chipset "AMD FCH".
Enabling flash write... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.V" (8192 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ff800000.
This coreboot image (PC Engines:PC Engines apu2) does not appear to
be correct for the detected mainboard (PC Engines:PCEngines apu2).
Aborting. You can override this with -p internal:boardmismatch=force.

As you can see in the logs, they're the same exact board so I'm not sure why there's a mismatch?

They're not exactly the same: somebody decided things would look nicer if they added a space, so now you're forced to override the safety check to install the firmware. Let the author know the missing space didn't really bother you.

Guest

yes, the force option, I did not need that, strange.

Guest

@VAMike:

@kevindd992002:

Any ideas why I'm getting a board mismatch error:

Calibrating delay loop… delay loop is unreliable, trying to continue OK.
coreboot table found at 0xdffae000.
Found chipset "AMD FCH".
Enabling flash write... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.V" (8192 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ff800000.
This coreboot image (PC Engines:PC Engines apu2) does not appear to
be correct for the detected mainboard (PC Engines:PCEngines apu2).
Aborting. You can override this with -p internal:boardmismatch=force.

As you can see in the logs, they're the same exact board so I'm not sure why there's a mismatch?

They're not exactly the same: somebody decided things would look nicer if they added a space, so now you're forced to override the safety check to install the firmware. Let the author know the missing space didn't really bother you.

I must have gone from a different firmware version :)

kevindd992002

@VAMike:

@kevindd992002:

Any ideas why I'm getting a board mismatch error:

Calibrating delay loop… delay loop is unreliable, trying to continue OK.
coreboot table found at 0xdffae000.
Found chipset "AMD FCH".
Enabling flash write... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.V" (8192 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ff800000.
This coreboot image (PC Engines:PC Engines apu2) does not appear to
be correct for the detected mainboard (PC Engines:PCEngines apu2).
Aborting. You can override this with -p internal:boardmismatch=force.

As you can see in the logs, they're the same exact board so I'm not sure why there's a mismatch?

They're not exactly the same: somebody decided things would look nicer if they added a space, so now you're forced to override the safety check to install the firmware. Let the author know the missing space didn't really bother you.

Yes, I figured it out after a few seconds of Googling and stumbling upon your post in the PCEngines forum :)

@marjohn56:

yes, the force option, I did not need that, strange.

Probably because when you bought the device, you had a BIOS with version of 4.0.8 or above. I bet yours is pretty new.

Guest

Possibly, I have two APU's one that's live and one that's test. The live version runs 4.0.7, from the pcengines site.

The other has bounced around a bit, so maybe I did have to force it, or not…. can't remember. ::)

Stugots

Has anybody had any luck getting the front LED's to work with pfSense?

Guest

Has anybody had any luck getting the front LED's to work with pfSense?

Please read this post carefully word for word.
APU2C4 led´s

I would be installing a VM (FreeBSD 11.1) and compile it by my self and copy it then into the pfSense box.
Reddit apuled.ko

kevindd992002

What would the LED's do when those drivers are installed?

Veldkornet

I just wanted to check, does anyone else have these messages about needing to accept intel licenses in their /var/log/dmesg.boot?

I updated the firmware yesterday to 4.6.1, now I’m not sure if it’s related.

Of course, after doing what it says, the errors/warnings go away.

kevindd992002

@kevindd992002:

What would the LED's do when those drivers are installed?

BUMP!

Veldkornet

@kevindd992002:

What would the LED's do when those drivers are installed?

I suppose you would be able to configure the LED’s to show gateway status etc.
There are packages that you can install from the pfSense software repository (blinked and gwled) for this if you want to see what the options are. But apparently there’s some extra steps required to actually make it work.

I haven’t bothered, I never look at it anyway :P

Veldkornet

Well, I decided to have a look at these LED's. Installed the driver, LED's work.
During boot, the LED's all dance, and if I install the gwled package, they show the gateway status. Wonderful :)

Only, I noticed that gwled has a service, but doesn't start… it's annoying. Is this normal? See attachment. (On a sidenote, does anyone else 2x haproxy services?).

Secondly, I noticed the following in the my /var/log/dmesg.boot:

ada0: <samsung 850="" ssd="" evo="" msata="" 250gb="" emt41b6q="">ACS-2 ATA SATA 3.x device
ada0: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 238475MB (488397168 512 byte sectors)
ada0: quirks=0x3<4K,NCQ_TRIM_BROKEN>

What does this 4K,NCQ_TRIM_BROKEN mean exactly in normal English?

I also note that they have a solution below, but again, not quite sure what the difference is between the two….

if you're on 11.1-RELEASE or 11-RELEASE, you should add below on /boot/loader.conf.

If no other quirks is required:
kern.cam.ada.0.quirks="0x0"

If you need 4k quirks but want to drop NCQ_TRIM one:
kern.cam.ada.0.quirks="0x1"

*4k one is bit0 (0x1), and NCQ_TRIM one is bit1 (0x2).

The example above assumes the affected drive is recognized as ada0.
You should change "ada.0" to whatever appropreate.

gwled.PNG_thumb </samsung>

jwt

@Veldkornet:

What does this 4K,NCQ_TRIM_BROKEN mean exactly in normal English?

4k means "TRIM only works on 4096 byte requests that are 4096 byte aligned".

NCQ_TRIM means TRIM doesn't work if you send it as a queued request. For some drives, the SSD stops working with first trim request is issued from the filesystem (UFS or ZFS).

There is a bug that is fixed in 11.1-RELEASE. These quirks keep your drive working.

If you're running pfSense 2.4.x you can re-enable 4K sectors and TRIM by clearing the quirks with:

kern.cam.ada.0.quirks="0x0"

in /boot/loader.conf

or, if you need 4k quirks but want to drop NCQ_TRIM one:
kern.cam.ada.0.quirks="0x1"

4k one is bit0 (0x1), and NCQ_TRIM one is bit1 (0x2).

Or you can wait for pfSense 2.4.3, which will contain a software fix.

PiBa

@Veldkornet:

On a sidenote, does anyone else have 2x haproxy services?

I havn't seen that before..you should only have the lowercase 'haproxy' service.. Probably need to edit the config.xml to remove the wrong service tag.. (backup>edit>restore)or the more tricky:(edit /conf/config.xml,delete /tmp/config.cache) just make sure to keep the xml format valid..

pvoigt

I am using an APU2C4 with BIOS version 4.0.7.

It looks like PC Engines no longer maintains their web pages under
https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm

I am unable to find any binaries for latest versions 4.0.x and 4.6.x and appreciate any hints on that.

All I can find are related release infos/changelogs
https://github.com/pcengines/release_manifests/blob/coreboot-4.6.x/CHANGELOG.md

and source codes of coreboot
https://github.com/pcengines/coreboot/releases

Peter

software

I see some ROMs on the github:
https://github.com/pcengines/apu2-documentation

APU2 ROM should be there in legacy and mainline mode

pvoigt

@software:

I see some ROMs on the github:
https://github.com/pcengines/apu2-documentation

APU2 ROM should be there in legacy and mainline mode

Yeah, thanks a lot. Nevertheless, these are not the latest versions. I would have never searched for binaries in the documentation folder ;-).

valnar

Wow, I'm running 4.07. Any reason to go higher for pfSense? What's the recommended BIOS?

kevindd992002

I thought 4.07 is the latest?

pvoigt

@kevindd992002:

I thought 4.07 is the latest?

No, development is going on. Unfortunately, version schema is confusing and PC Engines does not update their corresponding web page. Moreover, binaries are at least for me, difficult to find.

What I have understood so far: There are two actively developed branches: 4.0.x denoted as "legacy" and a "mainline" 4.5.x/4.6.x. Latest versions are 4.0.14 and 4.6.6, respectively. Latest binary downloads for APU2 are available as 4.0.11 and 4.6.1.

One thing that I have just become aware of: coreboot determines the version number of the APU2 BIOS ROM but the APU2 ROM consists of several other components with its own version numbers like e.g. seabios and ipxe.