FreeBSD on Shuttle XPC systems

D

ddaley

I am looking to buy a Shuttle XPC system in order to build a FreeBSD workstation. I am thinking about one of these two:

http://us.shuttle.com/barebone/Models/SA76G2V2.html

http://us.shuttle.com/barebone/Models/SA76R4.html

I would prefer the 2nd one... if I can find it in stock.

I am worried that I'll order the system and not be able to get FreeBSD to run... and I have zero interest in a Windows PC. What are the chances that FreeBSD will work on this hardware? I will be using this primarily for development, so things like audio will be nice but not necessary.
 
Nothing jumps out immediately as being a problem. Realtek 8111E should work, may need a recent 8-STABLE. Radeon HD3000 ought to work, too (but untested by me). Mini-ITX means you could replace the motherboard if necessary. Overall, I'd be surprised if it didn't work, but the money at risk isn't mine.
 
I have been meaning to post again... but wanted to wait until I had everything working. And, as of last night, I think everything is functioning.

The installation went smoothly, but first issue was that the realtek nic uses a hardware revision that isn't recognized. After searching some forums, I found information about a file I could patch to update the revision so that the nic driver would load. I don't remember the name of the file I patched off hand, but I can post that tonight when I get home. Once, I updated that file to have the new revision number and rebuilt the kernel, all was good.

The next issue was that I attempted to upgrade all ports, including X11 and KDE. This set me back a weekend. There were no issues specific to this hardware. But, I eventually got the ports upgraded and everything working again.

Last night, I finally did kldload snd_driver and it loaded a driver. Sound worked, but it didn't seem to recognize the audio hardware. I can post what it says about the hardware as well.
 
This is the message I see when I load the snd driver. I guess it recognizes the hardware as ATI SB600, but I see "Unknown" on several lines... not sure why or what impact that has. Sound seems to work.

Code: 
hdac0: <ATI SB600 High Definition Audio Controller> mem 0xfe8f4000-0xfe8f7fff irq 16 at device 20.2 on pci0
hdac0: HDA Driver Revision: 20100226_0142
hdac0: [ITHREAD]
hdac0: HDA Codec #0: IDT (Unknown)
pcm0: <HDA IDT (Unknown) PCM #0 Analog> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac0
pcm1: <HDA IDT (Unknown) PCM #1 Digital> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac0

The file I had to update in order to get the network card working was /usr/src/sys/pci/if_rlreg.h.

I had to update this line

Code: 
[B]#define      RL_HWREV_8168D    0x28000000[/B]

to

Code: 
[B]#define      RL_HWREV_8168D    0x2C800000[/B]

in order to match my hardware revision as printed out using dmesg | grep re0[B/]

Code: 
re0: <RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem 0xfdfff000-
0xfdffffff,0xfdff8000-0xfdffbfff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci3
re0: Using 1 MSI messages
re0: Chip rev. 0x2c800000
re0: MAC rev. 0x00000000
 
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