The Open Source Journal

Yesterday, my Intel BOXD945GCLF Atom mini-itx motherboard arrived. This silent, low power motherboard combo is perfect for a variety of applications, ranging from network firewalls to car PCs. There is a lot of excitement surrounding this motherboard and the future of small form factor computing in general. Since I wish to exploit this in a variety of areas, I turned to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. Read more to find out more information about the new Intel Atom processor, the D945GCLF motherboard that it comes with, and it's initial reaction to FreeBSD.

The D945GCLF Atom has what you'd expect: onboard sound (not 5.1), onboard ethernet (via a Realtek RTL8102EL chip), onboard video, a parallel port, and a serial port.

The CPU is cooled by a flimsily attached HSF assembly, and quite frankly, the fan is probably overkill. I haven't stress tested it yet, but given the power requirements of the board it's hard to imagine this thing actually requiring active cooling.

The network chipset is where Intel dropped the ball - the RTL8102EL chip supports 10/100: no gigabit. This is unfortunate, but not a show stopper; most people don't utilize gigabit anyways and it's unlikely the CPU can support gigabit level throughput without having a high quality chipset or TOE.

You might see that as a reason not to use this board as a file server. And if you're looking for a low power, multi-terabyte file server with drive redundancy, this board isn't for you - stick with a custom solution or (if you have the cash) a NAS storage array. Still, if you'd like a low power *NIX box, this and a couple of SATA disks will get you redundant storage.

After burning the AMD64 boot-only FreeBSD 7-RELEASE CD and starting a standard installation, I discovered that the realtek network card wasn't recognized. It seems that the RTL8102EL chip isn't yet supported; if you want network access on a FreeBSD system you'll need additional hardware.

My workaround on this was to install a PCI Intel GigE card, which worked flawlessly. I had no further problems installing FreeBSD, but haven't had much of a chance to test out the video. FreeBSD seemed to be it's usual, perky self however and I'm anxious to try this board out in a number of different scenarios.

In the next few days, I'll post some pictures of the board and get some more technical details. I can't wait until the dual-core (with two logical cores each!) comes out next month. I'll have to buy a couple to play around with. I definitely want one of these to act as an arcade/emulation system to run my old NES and SNES games on!