[SOLVED] Will the up-board work properly with freebsd?

Anouar Manders
Anouar Manders New Member Posts: 2
edited July 2018 in UP Board Linux
Hello,

I was wondering if the Atom x5-Z8350 CPU was fully supported under FBSD.
Does the GPU (Intel HD 400 Graphics series) work out of the box or does it require a special accelerated X driver?

I know, under linux there are some problems with audio over HDMI for this specific SOC, which requires a kernel modification. Is this kernel tweaking also required for FreeBSD?

Thank you in advance,

Anouar Manders

Comments

  • Didier
    Didier New Member Posts: 5
    I installed the FreeBSD 11.0 RC2 on a usb drive, and it seems to work. I don't know about the hdmi sound problem as I use a usb soundcard.
    I have a problem with the ethernet port (I also have that problem with linux ubuntu 16.04.1), no connection . To go on internet I use a 3g dongle.

    When installing FreeBSD you will encounter 2 problems:

    1: the up-board has only one uart, FreeBSD tries to find a second one .... and it hangs up here. To prevent that from happening, you will have to esc to the bootloader prompt and type the following command "unset hint.uart.1.at". At the end of the installing process, before rebooting, you can comment out the line concerning hint.uart.1.at="isa" in /boot/devices.hint (you will have to chmod +w, and use vi ).

    2: the intel, vesa graphics drivers have a problem. You will have to install the xf86-video-scfb driver and edit xorg.conf to replace "intel" or "vesa" by "scfb".

    Good luck.
  • Anouar Manders
    Anouar Manders New Member Posts: 2
    Thank you very much i will try it as I have received my board.
  • Nicolas
    Nicolas New Member Posts: 6
    I just received mine and started playing around. So far I could install OpenBSD without any troubles, network also seems to work, won't use sound or X11 though.
  • J M E
    J M E New Member Posts: 11
    edited October 2016
    Thanks for the hint about the UART! Completely foxed me why booot was hanging.
  • J M E
    J M E New Member Posts: 11
    I am failing trying to install FBSD11 onto the eMMC - this is not found by the installer. Did you encounter this problem?

    TIA.
  • Didier
    Didier New Member Posts: 5
    edited October 2016
    Interesting.

    No, I hadn't that problem. As I wrote it earlier, I installed FBSD on a usb drive.
    I had previously installed ubilinux on the eMMc to see if everything seemed to work correctly, but then I never used it again.
    To be honest stuff like eMMc or SD is not what I tend to install a system on.

    When booting to install FBSD, you have the possibility to start a shell. Can you see if the eMMc has been detected by the kernel at least.
    Maybe in the /dev/ directory you can find something related to it .

    I'm sorry to tell you this but I can't help you much more than that. My up-board died a couple of weeks ago. So I can't do tests for myself.


    Maybe you have already found this, but here are 2 links about the problem. I'm not sure it will help though.

    https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/50326/

    https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/55464/
  • J M E
    J M E New Member Posts: 11
    Hello and thanks for the quick reply.

    Yes. Have seen those postings to the list.

    Hope UP are sending you a new board ...

    BR.
  • maks
    maks New Member Posts: 5

    I had installed FreeBSD 11.1r on up-board 4Gb, 64GB drive with ZFS on internal eMMC drive and got freezes every 2-7 days. System lost a drive. I tried everything and got no results. So probably FBSD doesn't like internal drive controller or eMMC.

  • maks
    maks New Member Posts: 5
    edited July 2018

    Seems I found a problem. Overheating of eMMC drive... eMMC located on the reverse side of computer board and has a shared heat sink with RAM which is as fact, obviously, not enough. I had installed additional heatsink + fan and it definitely works much better and even faster then before (I see how applications works). Made the maximum load on the computer, cpu, drive, memory and video and worked perfectly for several hours without failures. So far so good. I couldn't imagine that the eMMC require additional cooling. I was sure it was designed for ambient temperatures and onboard heatsink should be enough. So this is was good experience. Hope it helps to someone. Conclusion: this is possible to install FBSD on internal drive even with ZFS, but you need additional cooling for reverse side as well.

  • ccalde
    ccalde New Member Posts: 348 ✭✭✭

    Hi @maks,

    Great to know that you got the UP and FreeBSD working properly using a better cooling system.

    Thank you!

  • maks
    maks New Member Posts: 5

    Right now it looks like this. Looks scary, but this is a temporary solution. Because another heatsink was not found. Works much stable now. Got one freeze but not because drive, but video memory. Chromium + youtube doesn't like low video memory. I changed video setting to default and 22 hours playing streaming video from youtube and so far so good.

  • maks
    maks New Member Posts: 5

    As fact additional heatsink didn't help too. For few days it worked fine but then again got freezes every 4-8 hours. So this is was definitely not a overheating problem. Also was wrong about back heatsink. This heatsink for CPU only. Memory and eMMC has not heatsinks at all. Tomorrow I had re-install FBSD completely from scratch with UFS on internal drive. Will look how it gonna works.

  • Jesse Kaukonen
    Jesse Kaukonen New Member Posts: 42 ✭✭

    We noticed some freezes with GPU use. For us there were three issues:

  • maks
    maks New Member Posts: 5

    Good day everyone. I'm back with good news. 23 days uptime. So it definitely works stable now. FreeBSD has been reinstalled from scratch on UFS to on-board eMMC. I don't know why OS did not work stable with on-board eMMC + ZFS. Even on installation stage FreeBSD was a freeze for 10 minutes when I tried to install OS with ZFS and it was instantly with UFS. So, this is was a good experience. Don't use ZFS for internal eMMC.