UEFI boot / Acer Revo RL70

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xtaz

I am contemplating purchasing an Acer Revo RL70 nettop to replace my ageing home server but I have some concerns before I pay my money. These boxes boot using the UEFI boot method with an EFI system partition. Googling for if FreeBSD supports this gives me little information. It appears from what I have found so far that it is supported on IA64 but is experimental and doesn't really work too well on other architectures. This is the dmesg from one on OpenBSD which gives me some hope about this. I have a couple of questions.

Does anybody know what the status is with UEFI boot on FreeBSD 9.1? Will I be able to install it quite easily on this box? Also does anybody have any experience of these boxes and happens to know if it has a BIOS emulation fallback mode where I could just install it with MBR rather than GPT partitioning or something?

Also it uses a Realtek 8111E NIC. Google gives mixed messages about these. I've seen reports of dropped packets, links going up/down at random. But then other reports say they work fine. So not sure what to think.

If anybody has some opinions, tips or experience I would love to hear them.
 
EUFI shouldn't be a problem, I have a Zotac Zbox that has EUFI and it boots FreeBSD without any issues.

Note, IA64 is not what you're looking for, you're probably looking for AMD64, or as Intel calls it "Intel 64".
 
http://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2012/IntelEFIBoot Suggests that amd64 is incomplete. But I guess I could run it with i386? I have zero experience with UEFI or GPT as every previous FreeBSD box I have installed has used the older MBR partitioning and the older sysinstall installer.

I assume the new installer in 9.x won't deal with this automatically and I would have to partition the EFI system partition manually and copy various files etc to it? Or am I overthinking this. How did you go about getting your system running?
 
You don't need to do anything. Just boot the installer and follow directions. There's no special EFI partition required.

For all intents and purposes UEFI will act and work just like a BIOS would.
 
Excellent. I think I'm probably reading too much into these things then from reading peoples issues that I've found on the net. I've seen people saying that some systems mistakingly see a GPT partitioning scheme on the disk as being UEFI and trying to boot from it and failing. I've also seen people saying some systems are purely EFI boot and won't do the BIOS fallback so I wanted to get as much information about this as I could before I took the plunge.

Am I right in thinking your Zotac Zbox is an AMD E450 motherboard? If so then that is the same board as is in the RL70 so that would be the best reassurance that it's going to work as I guess that would also have the same NIC I mentioned in my original post as well, and I guess you don't have any issues.
 
Thank you for your previous comments on this subject, however I've just come across this webpage: https://www.fehcom.net/lenovo/index.html which is VERY useful in answering a lot of the questions I had. It's a slightly older model of motherboard, E350 rather than E450 but it appears to have exactly the same setup with the EFI partition etc. And it appears to confirm what I had read about on various other sites. That the BIOS appears to detect GPT partitioning as EFI and tries to boot it, the only way around it seems to be to use MBR. But that page does say that using MBR allows it to work properly so this helps a lot.
 
OK. In the end I've actually gone for a Zotac Zbox Intel Atom myself. Decided the issues with EFI/GPT and that dodgy E450 BIOS are not worth the hassle. At least with the Intel board I know it will work fine and I can use GPT properly. Thanks for your help SirDice. Appreciated. This thread will probably be quite useful for others looking for information on this anyway!
 
Which one did you get? I have a Zotac Zbox ID80 and am very happy with it. It's a neat little mediaplayer.
 
Zotac Z-Box SD-ID12. Intel NM10 Express, GMA 3150, D525 Atom 1.8ghz. The only downside is it has a Realtek ethernet port which I was trying to avoid, but it appears pretty much all boards these days do. It was £128 UKP. Added a 640GB drive and 4GB of ram. Came to £213 UKP in total including delivery. Nettop boxes like these are quite hard to come by in the UK, very little choice. I did a lot of browsing of various online shops and this was the only model I could find really. I will be running it headless so the graphics capabilities don't really matter. I just needed something that would be reliable to run as a small web/email server and do other tasks like run irssi and mediatomb for streaming some files to my TV.
 
Nice choice, not too expensive. Mine was around 400 euro, a little more expensive but it does have an NVidia GT520 videocard. The harddrive that came with it is a bit on the slow side though, I might replace it with an SSD some time in the near future. But for the time being it's serving it's purpose very well.
 
The Zbox is installed and running now. Replaced my old server. Running FreeBSD 9.1-PRERELEASE amd64. Works a treat. It's many times faster than my old server. But then my old one was a Via C3 1ghz CPU with 1GB ram. This is a dual core with HTT 1.8ghz CPU with 4GB ram so you would expect it to be quicker. Buildworld/kernel using make -j4 took about 3 hours I think compared to the 16 hours it took on my old server.

Very pleased so far!
 
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