Minnowboard Turbot user report

Phishfry

Phishfry

Got a Minnowboard Turbot for Christmas and I have been putting it to work. I installed every operating system I have just to see how compatible it was. I could not get it to boot from DVDROM's so I used memsticks.
First off FreeBSD was the easiest of all installs. It was not phased by the UEFI only firmware and installed no problem, both 10.2 and -Current.
All the Ubuntu flavors worked well too. I got Arch to install via EFISTUB after many headaches trying to use their hyperlink intensive online manual.

I bought the Silverjaw Lure for mSATA and it worked well with a 16GB module. FreeBSD recognized various accessories in the MiniPCIe slot such as Atheros radios and Sierra Cellular for GPS. I also used the SATA port on the board to run a 128GB SSD. The board also offers an SD card slot. 5V for power and I am using 3 Amp power supply.

My only problem was FreeBSD Xorg will not load right as it is showing 2 monitors but the board only has 1 HDMI output. I did not have a chance to dig in. I was tempted to copy over my working Ubuntu xorg.conf. It may just be an monitor EDID problem though. Maybe dual graphics on CPU are present and one needs disabling.

It also ships with an top expansion header similar to the Pi's 26 pin header but different pinout.

Overall about $100 dollars more than a Pi but worth it to me personally. Feels like a work platform.
http://www.adiengineering.com/products/minnowboard-turbot/
 
Well that sounds like a learning challenge! I will have to try Bhyve. I may try and run pfSense under Bhyve..
No VT-d won't hurt? I want to pass thru the Sierra. Shows as USB device...
 
The BIOS looks alot like Award BIOS or Intel BIOS. The boot options are 3 menus deep under Boot Maintenance.

You need an SPI device to flash the firmware. This might be required if you need 32 bit EFI as Turbot's shipping firmware only supports 64 bit EFI-OS's. There may even be an legacy BIOS available.
 
I won a Turbot at AsiaBSDCon! A FreeBSD UEFI install went fine. Now I'm trying to figure out how to use the SDHC card. Is that possible?

All I used for a firmware update was the Intel download for EFI, as pointed to in the wiki, which I would link to except that right now it seems to be down. Download the Intel update program and firmware image, go into the EFI shell, and run it.
 
I didn't attempt a firmware update, but i was interested in a legacy bios option. I thought there was an SPI cable required to update the firmware. Did you notice the third party firmwares out there? It seems that the elinux support site quit updating right when the MBM Turbot came out. I am not sure why. Maybe they passed the torch from CircuitCo to ADI with the newer design.
http://elinux.org/Minnowboard:MinnowMax
 
Yes i was defiantly using the SD Card. I had FreeNAS on SD and used the mSATA for a storage drive.
If you checkout the firmware it has settings for the faster of SD Cards as well.(UHS-50 i believe)

Nice little package when compared to the ARM offerings if only for convenience of X86-64 software..Worth the extra money. Less of an experiment and more of a embedded device.

Not real fond of the EFI firmware but FreeBSD handled it like a champ.
Who wants a command prompt from their devices firmware. Not me. I could see the network boot people liking it.
 
I really like how well FreeBSD handles the serial/uart console automatically as well. All flavors of Linux I had to figure out what port and speed for agetty.
 
With 10.3-stable, no MMC device is detected on this one. It does not help that it uses a CR1225 CMOS battery, which is not available anywhere local to me. Without the battery, the settings are reset when power is lost. Right now, I'm building CURRENT to see if it has support for the MMC reader.
 
I was lucky enough to have a Batteries+ retail store within 10 miles.. Did you get a board only or with enclosure?
I have to confess. I am not 100% sure I used the SD card, but I am pretty sure I had FreeNAS on it with mSATA and external SATA drives for storage.
 
You think they would have given away a battery with it!!!! I gave JP from Netgate a hard time about it. It was a beancounter thing to keep cost low. Plus the original board you had to solder on the battery holder, so they saved you some soldering for the same price as the original!
 
It came with the custom laser-etched enclosure shown here: https://twitter.com/asiabsdcon and a 5V power wall-wart. No micro HDMI cable, but those were not too difficult to find.

The MMC device is shown in your dmesg output. Mine did not have that. Maybe a setting?

The board works fine with a SATA drive, but there's no hole in the enclosure for the SATA connector. I like the battery holder, just wish it was a commonly-available size like 1216 or 1220. Preferably 2032, because they are very common and I have a bunch of them for motherboards, but there are understandable space constraints.
 
Very nice case design indeed. We have been messing around with some embossed artwork on our waterjet at work but nothing that nice.
 
I keep hearing people ask if they can run a desktop on FreeBSD ARM and while it is possible I think a platform like this is much more suitable.
 
My ideal Lure for this device would have a MiniPCIe slot and a MiniPCIe(USB w/SIM) slot instead of the mSATA slot of the Silverjaw Lure.
A communications module.
Then on top expansion header we use a design like AndiceLabs PowerCape for the BBB(Power Monitoring, Battery backup,LI Battery and charger) and then we have an real embedded platform. Maybe throw in an POE injector/passthrough on the "PowerLure" for remote powering and also wider input range..

http://andicelabs.com/shop/andicelabs/beaglebone-power-cape/

Problem is by the time you design all the needed accessories the next "flavor of the week" comes out!!!
 
Phishfry said:
I keep hearing people ask if they can run a desktop on FreeBSD ARM and while it is possible I think a platform like this is much more suitable.
Click to expand...
Agreed, but I have not tested X on this yet, and don't know the situation with Bay Trail graphics. For anyone looking to get an idea of responsiveness, try a 64-bit Atom netbook, which is pretty much what this is, only in a small form factor with GPIO.
 
Update: Xorg works with the x11-drivers/xf86-video-scfb driver. Not accelerated, but seems pretty usable. Ben Woods pointed out on IRC that the boot loader prompt now has gop list to list the available modes and gop set to choose one. That mode is then kept for the console and used by X.

A CR1225 was located at a local Interstate Batteries store. They were the only place in town that had it.

There is a CMOS clear jumper on the board, J7, but it works differently than a normal motherboard. It must be set and then the system powered on to clear the CMOS settings.

The silkscreen would benefit from some words. The CMOS clear jumper, the SATA activity jumper, polarity on the fan header, all would help.

The board will boot from a microSD card, but the FreeBSD kernel still can't see it at all. There are more than a few mysterious UEFI settings related to the MMC reader and other things, and it could be one of those. Or a regression in FreeBSD-CURRENT, or maybe some hardware hints or something.
 
I am seeing the same thing with the microSD card reader. Not isolated to FreeBSD, even in some Linux the disk is a no show.
Odd thing is it show up as FS1 on the EFI prompt. Behind my USB drive labeled FS0(filesystem0) Both show proper drive geometry.
Also the device is labeled EFI Misc in the Boot Menu. PCI device 0x12
I am seeing the microSD when booted to a Mint 17.2 memstick. It is labeled as mmcblk0 and I see my Nas4Free partitions which i was attempting to try out tonight. It did not boot NAS4Free x64-embedded from a microSD card.
 
I even tried Nas4Free LiveUSB and it won't boot. There is no UEFI version yet from what I can find. Was the same with pfSense. No boot due to EFI.
 
I added instructions on setting up a UEFI boot to my Disk Setup On FreeBSD article. It doesn't take much, but can only boot 64-bit.

Set up that way, the Minnowboard sees the card reader and will boot from it. It loads the kernel, which runs and then fails to boot because it can't find the MMC reader.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top