nVidia ION Supported?

F

fbsd_fuse

Hello,
Can anyone confirm FreeBSD's support of the nVidia ION platform. This is a chipset combination for a Mini-ITX motherboard with an Intel Atom CPU.

ION usually gets used as the name for the GPU, but I'm mainly concerned with FreeBSD's support of the nVidia motherboard chipset MCP7A-ION and in particular its ethernet and SATA functions.

I can see a few people are using Mini-ITX boards with Intel chipsets, but how about nVidia's?

Thanks
Aaron
 
dennylin93 said:
See the hardware notes for a complete list supported hardware.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I've previously checked the supported hardware list and found a few close matches for support... but it's hard chipset to predict and the documentation online is inconclusive.

For example the page at the following link describes the chipset on a Pegatron IPX7A-ION motherboard top-to-bottom as a nVidia MCP79...

http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/Pegatron/IPX7A-ION/

Where the page on this link describes the same board as having a Realtek RTL8211CL ethernet and Realtek ALC662 audio (not that I really care about the audio)...

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/ipx7a_ion330

I'm more inclined to believe it's all nVidia based but I was hoping to find someone who could share the dmesg from a that type of motherboard so I could be sure.

dennylin93 said:
Ethernet for the following adapters seem to work:
Click to expand...

I've just put down a few $'s on the Point of View ION-MB330 so I'm hoping the devices will all come up as something MCP7 related.

Also, nVidia has recently released updated GPU FreeBSD drivers for the platform so I think it's a safe bet the rest of the chipset is mostly functional.

Still - if anyone has one of these boards I'd appreciate it if you could share the dmesg output. :)

Aaron
 
I've just installed FreeBSD on a Zotac ION N330.
As far as I could see FreeBSD 7.1 and upward works. On FreeBSD 7.0 atleast the ethernet isn't working during the installation process.

Also on the Zotac ION N330 there's a mini-PCI Express (AzureWave AR5B91) WiFi-card that doesn't work.
I've tried to use ndisgen at it seems to work most of the time, kernel gave up on me once. And "ifconfig ndis0 scan" is REALLY slow. But it can connect to an existing network 'n all.
 
ajo said:
I've just installed FreeBSD on a Zotac ION N330.
Click to expand...

Excellent! Good news.

Could you share the output of dmesg and pciconf please? A PM is ok if there's rules about keeping the forum beautiful. :)

Thank you for the confirmation.
 
Installing the NVIDIA drivers was one of the first things I did, it is the VDPAU in this little beauty i am after! And it seems to work. Displays some nice free advertising from NVIDIA when starting x aswell. :) Though I did not have time to check the VDPAU before testing 8.0 BETA2.

Though the issue with the AzureWare (Atheros) WiFi-card made me try out the 8.0 BETA2, which correctly detects the device as an Atheros card. But I am having issues with the install in that it stops in the "ROOT MOUNT ERROR:"-menu where my keyboard stops working, and it is trying to access the correct device. I really do not know how to proceed.
So a dmesg is probably not so interesting at this point - but i might try to install 7.1 again and upgrade that to CURRENT instead of 8.0 BETA2 - will be back with more news then.
 
Thanks for the tip. I will give it a try if CURRENT does not work.

There should be a dmesg attached to this post. :)
 

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Thanks for the dmesg. It all looks good - except for the hard drive speed is slow.

From the dmesg...

ad4: 95396MB <FUJITSU MHV2100BH 0081002D> at ata2-master UDMA33

The specs for that drive say it's a 2.5" SATA unit - possibly SATA II? It is capable of more than UDMA33.

Do you think this is a BIOS thing (running in ATA compatibility mode?) or the FreeBSD driver?

Thanks
 
I'm curious to see what these are:

Code: 
pci0: <memory, RAM> at device 0.1 (no driver attached)
pci0: <memory, RAM> at device 3.1 (no driver attached)
pci0: <memory, RAM> at device 3.3 (no driver attached)
pci0: <processor> at device 3.5 (no driver attached)
 
The buildworld failed with a cryptic error code 1.

The only thing attached to the motherboard is 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, the SATA (not SATA II) HDD and the "integrated" mini PCI-Express AzureWave/Atheros WiFi-module.

So my guess would be that it's the WiFi that it can't detect, or maybe it's the GPU - the NVIDIA drivers aren't installed here? I really have no idea.
 
Sorry can't do that it's gone. Will give it another try tonight though.
Maybe I can post it then.. :)

There's no ATA connections at all on this card and the BIOS settings looks alright.
 
Don't know what that is. But I haven't been doing anything really with this installation, so if it's on by default it's on.

After csup'ing again today and buildworld - it worked. Now I'm off for buildkernel and if that turns out well and all I'll have some more info on the Atheros/AzureWave card.
Maybe I'll put that in another thread - I guess fbsd_fuse got his answer.

But if I get this to work I'd be happy to help you with anything regarding the NVIDIA drivers you'd like to know. I'll let you know if the 8.0-CURRENT works.
 
Well that was a waste of time. Got the same error when booting up. buildworld, buildkernel and installkernel followed by mergemaster -p seemed to do what it's supposed to - but when booting i got the same error as before.

In my current setup I rely on using an USB-stick to install FreeBSD, which is troublesome to say the least when only running Windows. I'll give it another try with BETA3 when that get's released here in the beginning of next week - hopefully by that time this issue has been resolved.
 
After failing to install the i386 8.0-BETA2 (installation can't find boot disk, and keyboard hangs/system freezes don't know which) I've now tried the AMD64 8.0-BETA2 version.

This version I can't even get to install. I get the following error messages:

Code: 
Unable to find device node /dev/ad4s1b in /dev. The creation of the file systems will be aborted.

In the debug TTY I can read the following:
Code: 
Found rootdev at ad4s1a
Found vardev at ad4s1d
Found tmpdev at ad4s1e
Found usrdev at ad4s1f
Found swapdev at ad4s1b
 
Hi,

I've got FreeBSD 7.2 running (courtesy of FreeNAS 7.0RC1) and can confirm that GigE works on the ION, but SATA is limited to UDMA33.

Has anyone here run 8.0 to see if it helps the SATA issue? Release notes make no mention of it, and haven't yet had a chance to try myself.
 
You need to provide more info. Which motherboard? Which chipset? Posting the output of [cmd=]dmesg[/cmd] will help.

Also for FreeNAS specific issues/questions will be better answers from their forums/support.
 
Can you try with 8.0-BETA3-amd64-memstick.img to see if the HDD/Installation issues are solved and if all devices are correctly working?
 
Pov ion 330

To reply to my original post. I've recently received my Point of View ION 330 motherboard and after a few small issues the board is working perfectly now. A 8.0-BETA3 dmesg is attached.

I had two issues getting things working. First up was USB - I had to disable USB 2.0 in the BIOS to get FreeBSD to boot. It's now working with USB 1.0 and a USB keyboard and mouse work perfectly. The second issue was the drives being picked up as ATA-33. As posted above, the solution was to change the SATA controller settings in BIOS from SATA to AHCI. They're now working at SATA-300.

I haven't tested sound or a GUI yet. But it's doing everything I need for a NAS box.
 

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  • Thanks
Reactions: ajo
Sorry for the bump. But I thought it's better to keep this in one thread since it, in my opinion, is all related.

Now I've given 8.0 one more try on my Zotac ION N330.
What I did was # freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.0-RC3 from a 7.2-RELEASE (that has been working flawlessly for the last 30 days or so, except for not detecting the WiFi). The upgrade process seemed to work alright. This was followed by # freebsd-update install and a reboot.

Upon booting FreeBSD I get stuck with the exact same "ROOT MOUNT ERROR", as before. When typing "?" in the mountroot-prompt I get completely different labels for the drives than what FreeBSD is trying to boot from.

Changing BIOS settings to USB 1.1 only and SATA to AHCI (as fbsd_fuse suggested) made the keyboard work in the "mountroot"-prompt and also FreeBSD detects the HDD as SATA-150. So that's good news.

Is there a previously known bug related to the "root mount error", or is this only happening to me?
I would hope that these kind of things would be solved for an RC3, but there, sadly, seems to be reasons why the 8.0-trunk is not yet called release.
 
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