FreeBSD on ASRock Beebox (Intel N3000 based micro-barebone)

C

cwf-ml

Hello,

I am trying to get FreeBSD 10.3 (amd64) on an ASRock Beebox. The system is supposed to work as my home server / default FreeBSD box. The Beebox is a pretty recent tiny fanless barebone system sporting an Intel N3000. If you combine that with modest memory and a small mSATA drive, you can get a fully functional server for something like 190 € or US$ (though I spent some 50 bucks more on a larger SSD). It's basically the ASRock pendant to Intel's NUC.

Anyway, FreeBSD/amd64 installs and runs well so far, with CPU, network, chipset and USB supported.

But there are some things missing. By the specs, the system supports SMBus for monitoring (?) with an Intel smbus controller - but I couldn't get FreeBSD to recognize that.

And the system also comes with a very nice and quite fast mPCI based wireless Realtek card, which FreeBSD doesn't
recognize either.

pciconf -lv says:
Code: 
none1@pci0:0:31:3:      class=0x0c0500 card=0x22921849 chip=0x22928086 rev=0x21 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
    class      = serial bus
    subclass   = SMBus

none2@pci0:1:0:0:       class=0x028000 card=0x882110ec chip=0x882110ec rev=0x00 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL8821AE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter'
    class      = network

Any ideas on those?

Also, I found some articles detailing ACPI based temperature monitoring. Apparently this is not working here, too. The whole hw.acpi.thermal block is not present in sysctl -a. I could get the coretemp module running, though, which at least gives me the CPU core temperature for both cores in dev.cpu.[01].temperature.

Any ideas as to both issues?
- SMBus / acpi-thermal / Monitoring etc
- wireless support for the Realtek 8821AE ?

Any input is gratefully appreciated :)
-- Chris
 
Revisiting this. System has been running fine for the last 6 months, just updated it to 10.3-p20.
The issues, though, persist.

Yes, I have loaded smbus.ko. And whatever else seemed remotely appropriate:

#kldtstat
Code: 
(...)
 3    3 0xffffffff819c2000 23d0     smbus.ko
 4    1 0xffffffff819c5000 113b0    ipmi.ko
 5    1 0xffffffff819d7000 4468     iic.ko
 6    3 0xffffffff819dc000 62a0     iicbus.ko
 7    1 0xffffffff819e3000 4408     iicsmb.ko
(...)

#cat /boot/loader.conf
Code: 
(...)
smbus_load="YES"
ipmi_load="YES"
iic_load="YES"
iicbus_load="YES"
iicsmb_load="YES"
(...)

No mention of smbus or smb in /var/run/dmesg.boot .
No /dev/smb? device.
 
I think its same to ignore the smbus device not recognized. I have the same on my Sandy Bridge Dell notebook.

Code: 
none1@pci0:0:31:3:   class=0x0c0500 card=0x04931028 chip=0x1c228086 rev=0x04 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
    device     = '6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller'
    class      = serial bus
    subclass   = SMBus
 
Phishfry said:
I am not an expert but I see no ill effects of the unrecognized device on my computer.
Click to expand...
Lol yeah... except that you can not use it. And since the BeeBox is a fanless box I'd really like to look a little closer at its thermal state.
Phishfry said:
Have you consider a Atheros wireless module? I can recommend one.
Click to expand...
I dont have a pressing need right now for wireless on it, but it would be nice to have it nonetheless. It has decent wireless hardware, I should be able to use it.

As for the atheros card - the box has no extension slots.

Have a look:
Beebox-S%20Series%20(Kaby%20Lake).png
 
but you can replace the internal (RealTek) wireless card with a different one (Atheros) if you want. One that is supported by a working driver in FreeBSD.
Unless somebody is actively working on adding support in the RealTek driver for your card, nothing is going to happen.
Things you can do if you want to improve the situation:
a) create a bug report with all the necessary details about your wireless card (offering to test patches increases the chance that a developer without the exact same hardware will try to improve the driver)
b) learn how to write code and become a FreeBSD developer, the improve the driver yourself
 
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