Hi,
I've finally gotten my hands on one of Zotac's latest Zbox releases - the Zbox Nano ID61. For those who haven't been waiting for this, it's their first foray into putting an Intel CULV chipset into a product line that has otherwise been dominated by Atom and AMD Fusion chips. The chip in question is a Celeron 867. Do some research, but I think you'll find that this little guy could make for a neat little lite duty server, better than any Atom/AMD equivalent. Intel even threw in hardware virtualisation for us!
So far most things seem to work well.
My only complaint is the fan is a bit noisy - not something you want on your desk.
USB and PXE booting both work. On the whole the BIOS seems good, and POSTs quickly.
I'm testing with a recent checkout of FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE, and components that don't work include:
USB3 half works in that the kernel detects an xhci(4) device, but when a USB3 device is plugged in, it takes a few seconds before a timeout kernel error is printed and the device ends up connecting to an ehci(4) controller.
The ICH watchdog attracts an ichwd(4) device attachment, but running watchdogd(8) and then killing it does nothing. Strangely if a timeout is manually set with the watchdog(8) utility, the system will reboot if watchdogd is not running. No combination of these two seems to make the watchdog practically usable though.
MMC/SD shows up as a USB device, but no drivers attach to it.
Bluetooth gets an ng_ubt(4) device attachment, but the bluetooth stack fails to start.
Things I haven't tested:
This isn't the best media center PC, so I probably won't test the last 3 items. I have no other Displayport hardware, so I can't test that either.
Next post will have the nerdy bits.
I've finally gotten my hands on one of Zotac's latest Zbox releases - the Zbox Nano ID61. For those who haven't been waiting for this, it's their first foray into putting an Intel CULV chipset into a product line that has otherwise been dominated by Atom and AMD Fusion chips. The chip in question is a Celeron 867. Do some research, but I think you'll find that this little guy could make for a neat little lite duty server, better than any Atom/AMD equivalent. Intel even threw in hardware virtualisation for us!
So far most things seem to work well.
My only complaint is the fan is a bit noisy - not something you want on your desk.
USB and PXE booting both work. On the whole the BIOS seems good, and POSTs quickly.
I'm testing with a recent checkout of FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE, and components that don't work include:
- MMC/SD card reader (no boot support either)
- USB3
- Bluetooth
- ICH watchdog
USB3 half works in that the kernel detects an xhci(4) device, but when a USB3 device is plugged in, it takes a few seconds before a timeout kernel error is printed and the device ends up connecting to an ehci(4) controller.
The ICH watchdog attracts an ichwd(4) device attachment, but running watchdogd(8) and then killing it does nothing. Strangely if a timeout is manually set with the watchdog(8) utility, the system will reboot if watchdogd is not running. No combination of these two seems to make the watchdog practically usable though.
MMC/SD shows up as a USB device, but no drivers attach to it.
Bluetooth gets an ng_ubt(4) device attachment, but the bluetooth stack fails to start.
Things I haven't tested:
- eSATA
- Displayport
- HD Audio
- Infrared
- X11/DRI
This isn't the best media center PC, so I probably won't test the last 3 items. I have no other Displayport hardware, so I can't test that either.
Next post will have the nerdy bits.