EPIA-M 10000 - Linux on a Mini ITX

EPIA-M Mainboard and Linux 2.6

Edoceo purchased an EPIA-M based computer system for research purposes. Here is what we found.

The Hardware

The EPIA-M Mini-ITX mainboard fits in many different cases, our choice was the black CaseTronic C134. The EPIA-M inside was the M10000 flavor, it's a 1GHz Nehemiah we have 512M RAM installed. The case, mainboard and memory cost about $350 USD. For the initial testing no internal storage was purchased. Slimline CD/DVD and internal Flash or laptop storage are available.

Initial Impression

Because we had no storage for the device we had to rig something together as visible here. This works fine for testing but don't put it into production! The connected HDD is a 40G Maxtor IDE, this board supports modern IDE66 drives. The drive contained a development image of Gentoo GNU/Linux 2.6 built for Pentium4. It booted right up, passed the init process and started running our system.

The machine the HDD is plugged into had a different NIC so we rebuilt the kernel taking note to switch processor type to VIA C3-2 Nehmeiah at the same time. The build takes a little longer than it does on a 1.2G P4 but not much longer. Moved the bzImage in place and rebooted. It came right back up, on the network and we were able to SSH in; no problems.

For grins we did a rebuild of PHP5 (using portage tools), this took about 30m but was again not precicely measured, watch for updates. This went off with out a hitch. Other packages that we installed and upgraded (emerge -uDN world) were all smooth.

Real(ish) World Use

This little system is used as an appliance in our facility and usually runs Apache, DNSMasq, OpenVPN, Samba, SSH and some other utilities we've written. The first test pass had zero faliures and all subsystems responded in reasonable amounts of time.

Overall this system is great, we're going to throw in a 1Gb Flash module and check that out, watch for continued story.

System Details

Here's some system information on the EPIA-M as seen by Linux and related tools.

Note: Must have a model 9 or better for Linux 2.6

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : CentaurHauls
cpu family      : 6
model           : 9
model name      : VIA Nehemiah
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 999.939
cache size      : 64 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr cx8 sep mtrr pge cmov pat mmx fxsr sse rng rng_en ace ace_en
bogomips        : 2002.71

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8623 [Apollo CLE266]
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
00:0d.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 74)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8623 [Apollo CLE266] integrated CastleRock graphics (rev 03)

Note: Comments (#) have been added by Edoceo, oh and we avoid modules if possible.

zgrep VIA /proc/config.gz
# Processor Type
CONFIG_MVIAC3_2=y
# CONFIG_BLK_DEV_VIA82CXXX is not set
# Device Drivers - Network - Ethernet 10/100 - VIA Rhine + MMIO
CONFIG_VIA_RHINE=y
CONFIG_VIA_RHINE_MMIO=y
# Device Drivers - I2C - VIA (long one)
CONFIG_I2C_VIA=y
CONFIG_I2C_VIAPRO=y
# Where is this stuff found?
# CONFIG_VIA_VELOCITY is not set
# CONFIG_AGP_VIA is not set
# CONFIG_DRM_VIA is not set
# CONFIG_SENSORS_VIA686A is not set

ChangeLog

2006-05-06 - Created /djb

« Ubuntu Live USB «

» Marvell SATA Linux Kernel Modules »