On 10/11/12 12:05, Gary Palmer wrote:
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 04:54:53PM +0200, Ulrich Sp??rlein wrote:
Hey guys,
I need to replace an aging Pentium IV system that has been serving as my
router, access point, file- and mediaserver for quite some time now. The
replacement should have:
- amd64 CPU (for ZFS, obviously)
- 2x GigE (igress, egress interfaces)
- some form of wlan interface (I currently use an Atheros based PCI card)
- eSATA for attaching a backup disk where I stream ZFS snapshots to
- serial port is always nice, for when I mess up an upgrade
- fan-less if possible
So far, this here seems to fit the bill perfectly
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc/intensepc/
but pricing seems to defy any reality.
It does not state directly which chipsets are used for Wifi and
Ethernet, the block diagram claims Ethernet chips to be Intel 82579 and
RTL8111D, but I don't trust that fully.
For Wifi I can always fall back to sticking in a supported USB stick,
although that's kinda hacky.
So how well is networking going to be supported by FreeBSD? Should I
just bite the bullet and find out?
I'd recommend the Soekris net6501, but it's even more expensive than the
intensepc (I suspect due to low hardware volumes but thats just a guess)
http://soekris.com/products/net6501.html
You also don't specify what kind of storage you need, which is obviously
an important factor for a file/media server.
Gary
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Be wary of the Soekris net6501, I bought three of the 1.6Ghz net6501-70
model which has an Atom E-680 cpu (E series) and it compiles more than
twice as slow as a 1.6Ghz Atom N270 in an older netbook. Someone else
running Linux reported similar CPU slowness. As far as practical
network throughput, I could only get 100Mbit/sec with a simple HTTP
download of a file full of zeros, and OpenVPN could only push about
25Mbit/sec. As a practical example of the CPU slowness, it takes about
1.5 minutes to compile pkg on the N270 netbook and 5 minutes on the 6501
(around 4.5 if I use -j2). A kernel compile took an hour.
Unfortunately I had no idea this CPU (possibly implementation?) was so
slow before I purchased it, and I could scarcely find evidence of it on
google after hours of searching when I had already discovered the issue.
I was hoping to find some comparative benchmarks between various Atom
series but manufacturers generally don't do that.
Additionally, the total AHCI SATA write speed on the net6501 (in BSD
only?) has a strange 20MB/sec limitation but reads can go over
100MB/sec. If I write to one disk I get 20MB/sec, if I write to both
SATA disks I get 10MB/sec each. Write is equally slow on a SSD. Both
someone running OpenBSD and I running FreeBSD reported the same symptoms
to the soekris-tech mailing list and received no useful replies towards
getting that problem solved. I tested the write speed briefly with
Linux and it did not appear to have the 20MB/sec limitation. I did
confirm it was using MSI(-X?) with boot -v. I think this hardware would
need to fall into Alexander Motin's hands to get anywhere with debugging
the SATA speed issue. Since it seems fine in Linux, maybe some day it
can be fixed in BSD but I have no clue how that limitation could happen.
The disks I tested with are fine in normal computers.
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