solaris or bsd ZFS on zacate / hudson / brazos

I've seen several posts talking about how the zacate board are great for a little nas server but I'm wondering has anyone tried one yet? Most of boards seem to be using the realtek 8111 ethernet and that's supported on bsd and solaris. Graphics aren't really an issue but I'm sure vesa framebuffer would work. I'm mostly concerned with the sata chipset; what good is your nas server if it can't see any disks? I can't find any solid information either way.

Since it offers 6 native AHCI ports it should just work with the best driver available (in BSD at least).

But you're right, it remains untested. My Asus Zacate board is still in pre-order. Once i test it i can provide final details though, and proof that it works. But i have no reason to think that it doesn't. Any AHCI compliant hardware should work on the AHCI driver; it's not hardware specific.

I just remember back when sata were coming on the market some controllers (jmicron specifically) had an issue where they implemented a certain feature differently and drivers had to be customized. I know those details are vague but I'm sure all of this is archived on the mailing lists if anyone is that interested.

I'm looking at either atom or zacate right now and those 6 ports are nice; I guess I just dont want to be stuck with a board where I'm waiting for support.

The issue you remember could be support for NCQ, which was optional for SATA 1.0 and alot of vendors/controllers decided not to support it. SATA 2.0 or SATA/300 standard made NCQ mandatory, so all recent SATA controllers support NCQ.

Asus passively cooled Zacate board:
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=9BmKhMwWCwqyl1lz

It has only 5 SATA/600 though; the 6th is used for eSATA. You could wire that back in your casing of course, but you can also consider using the 6th for a real external drive, such as for backups.

I did a little googling I was thinking of the jmicron 363 chip which used a slightly nonstandard way of implementing ahci (bar5 instead of bar0) it required modification to the ahci driver on linux, solaris and I think freebsd. Something like that isn't a show stopper as it's an easy fix but with everyone waiting on preorders it could be a while.

Even with some of the other zacate boards that only have 4 sata ports it's still better then all but the most expensive atom boards. Before these boards started coming out I was trying to find an atom board with 4+ sata ports and gigE, there are only a handful out there plus they're expensive.

I decided to dive in and I ordered one yesterday. I ended up going with the asrock board as it's $40 cheaper then the other brands, it supports upto 16 gigs of memory, and it's actually in stock and available. The downsides are only 5 sata ports (4 + esata) but I don't see myself using anymore than 4 or 5 disks on a mini system like of course there's always the pci-e slot for an addon controller. Active cooling but I can probably add a better heatsink and go passive via aftermarket in a few months when things get cheap. I'll do some bechmarking if my board happens to arrive first.

Cool, looking forward to seeing your results.

Wouldn't the lack of Intel NIC be a problem?

forumator said:

Wouldn't the lack of Intel NIC be a problem?

Click to expand...

The Realtek 8111 series generally has decent support. You could add a PCI-e Intel NIC as well, and it's still cheaper than the other board

So far all of the zacate boards are using the realtek 8111e. The earlier models in the 8111 series are supported on bsd and solaris; tho I think a 3rd party driver is needed on solaris. Part of this is a learning experiment as this point I can't find reliable data on any of these boards as none of the reviews have tried anything but windows desktop use. Which is a shame since on paper these boards look like they're absolutely perfect for a small nas system. If if it turns out nothing is supported and I can't find any indication support is being worked on the board goes back under the 30 day return and I eat the restocking fee.

Realtek 8111e is listed in cvs source tree of FreeBSD

"RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E PCIe Gigabit Ethernet"

As for South Bridge

The AMD ata source in FreeBSD cvs tree web-search has not seen update in general web version (I am not sure whether it is active in other ways).

* As a reference for comparison, FreeBSD cvs source tree Intel south bridge driver recent update includes Patsburg in the notice, which it says about 5-weeks ago.

The a50m southbridge sata is listed as working and supported just by the generic ahci driver under linux. I can't find any recent mentions of it in the kernel mailing list so it looks like it's fully ahci compliant and nothing fancy was needed. Hopefully the bsd and solaris ahci drivers will 'just work' too.

The only thing I wish is amd branded this better if you search for fusion(which is usually too broad) or zacate or brazos or bobcat or e-350 or a50m you get different results.

Has anyone tried solaris on one of the new zacate systems yet?

s0rce said:

Has anyone tried solaris on one of the new zacate systems yet?

Click to expand...

I would like to know this aswell, especially if the integrated NIC works.

Probably should have put this here instead of a new thread:

Hey Everyone,

I've been planning to build a small home server for backup (rsync, nfs, afp, timemachine), usenet downloading (sabnzbd/sickbeard), AV streaming, print server (CUPS, single laser printer) and maybe some simple VOIP (asterisk). I was hoping for any comments/suggestions on this build (I know zocate is new but the price/performance is great). I'm not a packrat so I'm going to keep this small and relatively cheap.

I plan on using Solaris 11 Express + Napp-it (but I might go with Nexenta since I'm familiar with Debian/Ubuntu, haven't completely decided yet).

Here is the part list, please take a look:

Mobo/CPU: ASRock E350M1 AMD Zacate E350
RAM: Mushkin Enhanced Silverline 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3
OS Drive: Kingston SSDNow S100 SS100S2/8G
RAID Z1 Drives: 3x 2TB HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632
Case: APEX MI-100 Black (cheap w/PS)

I plan on going with a new zocate board (the ASRock) and I hope the network card (Realtek 8111E) will play well with solaris but if not the mobo has a PCIe slot so I figure I can put in a intel gigabit nic (Intel EXPI9301CTBLK). I know there is some interest in the zocate setup so I will make sure to document the build and run benchmarks people are interested in.

I think I might want to mirror the OS drive but I'll need to use the eSATA port and I'm not sure exactly how to set that up in Solaris 11 Express (seemed easier in Nexenta - maybe Napp-it can integrate a OS ZPool mirror function!)

Any help/suggestions on the build would be great!

Thanks very much,
s0rce

I've tinkered with a rather similar setup for the last few weeks, having tried freenas and freebsd 8.2 and settled on solaris.

I had performance trouble with samba on freebsd so I didn't even bother on solaris; cifs works really well but permissions are a pain in the ass with it, my advice is to just use the rw=host:host:host... mount option and have a guest account for read access, which is fairly trivial to do.

There is some arcana out there for getting zfs to use the proper sector size (4k) on these smaller advanced format drives, if you search a bit you'll find it.

AHCI works fine on both platforms.

RTL8111E (the integrated NIC on my zacate board) doesn't support jumbo frames on solaris or freebsd out of the box. I did some searching on this, it's not clear, but I believe there may be a way to enable them on solaris by adding a few options in /kernel/drv/rge.conf. The performance gains would be purely academic for my use case and I haven't bothered on account.

I'd be interested in enabling jumbo frames as my gigabit switch supports them too. I hope my replacement HDD will get here monday so I can finally get my zpool up and running, so far the server isn't doing all that much.