X86-PC supported hardware

[tony]

We are nearing the release of the V3 X86-PC version for desktop systems.

This is the tentative list of Ethernet hardware we are going to support in the initial release.

[ update #1 - 2006-08-15 ]
This list also reflects the current device load ordering.

Supported 10/100:
Intel(R) PRO/100+
SiS 900/7016
VIA Rhine
nVidia nForce
RealTek RTL-8129/8130/8139
National Semiconductor DP8381x
Broadcom 4400
3Com 3c590/3c900 series
3Com 3cr990 series "Typhoon"
Early DECchip Tulip (dc2104x)
DECchip Tulip (dc2114x)
Generic DECchip
Davicom DM910x/DM980x
ULi M526x

Supported 1 GbE:
Intel(R) PRO/1000
Alteon/3Com 3C985 Gigabit
D-Link DL2000-based Gigabit
National Semiconductor DP83820
Packet Engines Hamachi GNIC-II
SiS190/SiS191 Gigabit
SysKonnect GigaEthernet
SysKonnect Yukon2
Marvell Yukon/SysKonnect SK-98xx
VIA Velocity support
Broadcom Tigon3
Broadcom NetXtremeII

Supported 10 GbE:
Intel(R) PRO/10GbE
Chelsio 10GE
S2IO 10GbE XFrame

Watchdog support:
i8xx TCO
Software (for everything else).

During the upgrade of your StarOS system to v3, device re-ordering can be a serious concern if you have miss-matched ethernet cards in your system.

If you have specific ethernet hardware you would like to see supported, please let us know.

Note: There will be access to the configuration manager via keyboard, however there will be no mouse support. (maneuvering via keyboard is quite easy, and quick).

[Stratolinks]

The list looks very good. All our NICs are IntelPro or Realtek 8139, all chipsets are intel, CPUs intel etc. Everything is already compatible.:D
:confused:
Could you please clarify the "i8xx TCO" watchdog you mentioned. A number of our routers are single board computers based on the i815e chipsets, but there is no mention of a watchdog in relation to this chipset.

All these boards have a hardware watchdog based on the common port 443 watchdog timer found on at least 10 different brands of industrial PCs. After the full release of V3 on x86, we would be willing to assist financially for the development of support for this watchdog timer. We would be happy to provide you with some hardware to do any testing on as well. After all adding external watchdogs to all these is no small feat either.

Lets keep the good news rolling out, and keep up the great work.

[mp3turbo]

I'm missing rtl8169 support in gigabit cards... make sure to use latest driver, taiwanese guys are changing it every month (do not use driver built-in kernel). There was one version which was totally unable to transfer data. As soon as you did ping to x86 computer with 8169, it hang completely. This was about year ago. Most recent version pulls around 40MB/s.

Although these cards are inferior to intel, they will be/are wide spread and they work.

Also, it should be easy to implement Syskonnect gigabit drivers and Via Velocity (1000Mbps variant of 100Mbit Rhine). Let me examine my collection of .o drivers :)

thnx, mp3turbo.

[tony]

The following Intel controller hubs support the watchdog:

82801AA (ICH)
82801AB (ICHO)
82801BA (ICH2)
82801BAM (ICH2-M)
82801CA (ICH3-S)
82801CAM (ICH3-M)
82801DB (ICH4)
82801DBM (ICH4-M)
82801E (C-ICH)
82801EB (ICH5)
82801ER (ICH5R)


We are open to discussions about writing a watchdog driver for the "port 443" interface.

[wwalcher]

The following Intel controller hubs support the watchdog:....


What kind of boards have these controller hubs? Do most motherboards have them, or just specialized industrial-type computers or SBC's?

[Stratolinks]

What kind of boards have these controller hubs? Do most motherboards have them, or just specialized industrial-type computers or SBC's?
I don't have any desktop boards to look at to know for certain, but some of the industrial boards that I use have it, some don't.

The Advantech PCM-9577FG (on-board gigabit ethernet) which is based on the Intel 815e chipset does not, but most of the other chips are Via. The Advantech PCI-6780 (on board intel pro 100 ethernet) which is also based on the Intel 815e chipset does have the 82801AB chip on it. Both of these boards are Socket 370 supporting up to a 1.4GHz P3 or Celeron.

[sir_lunatic]

How about adding support for the Tulip 21140 and the Nat Semi DP8381 ethernet controllers. These are the most common chipsets for multiport ethernet cards these days. This would allow us to make some really awesome routers.

[tony]

Thanks.

Consider them supported.

[tony]

The list of supported ethernet cards has been updated.

[sir_lunatic]

Now thats what I call support.........gracias

[ninedd]

Hi. I know there's be discussion on whether or not to include these drivers. I see that you've decided to go ahead and include them. Do you know, are the drivers that are compiled into V3 going to be better, or is the problem more fundamentally a hardware issue? I know there's nothing you can do to correct this - I'm just asking if you know if the new kernal or current 3Com/Linux drivers address any of the wierdness of the past? Thank you.

[tony]

I have done some limited testing with a system that has a built-in 3Com card, and it does seem to work Ok. I am unsure as to how other types of 3Com cards will react, or how reliable they will be after months of continuous operation.

[lonnie]

We have no idea since we would never use 3Com, but I know people do, so we are including support.

[bminish]

Can we have support for AMD PCnet PCI please
these load in v2 with the pcnet32 driver

these are the NIC card presented by vmware server (&workstation) to the guest operting system

we run our V2 server under vmware server and have also used vmware workstation from time to time to debug issues

.brendan

[lonnie]

Sorry, but vmware will not be supported for V3.

Can we have support for AMD PCnet PCI please
these load in v2 with the pcnet32 driver

these are the NIC card presented by vmware server (&workstation) to the guest operting system

we run our V2 server under vmware server and have also used vmware workstation from time to time to debug issues

.brendan

[bminish]

Sorry, but vmware will not be supported for V3.

but can we have support for the pcnet32 nic please?

[lonnie]

No, we do not wish to support that card since it is pretty much only used for vmware.

but can we have support for the pcnet32 nic please?

[bminish]

but can we have support for the pcnet32 nic please?

OK
Will you refund my recent licence upgrade since that was for our Vmware server, it's the X86 upgrade on our westnet account

Care to disclose why you won't support Vmware?

We are using vmware server to virtulise much of our network edge since it allows us good use of hardware resources combined with the ability to have a great deal of fault tolerance.
It's also very useful for testing.

[tony]

We have, over the years found that a bulk of staros pirated licenses are in use on vmware and other virtualization systems. As such, we have little incentive to support vmware with star-v3.

[bminish]

We have, over the years found that a bulk of staros pirated licenses are in use on vmware and other virtualization systems. As such, we have little incentive to support vmware with star-v3.

I cannot speak for others but we run one instance of Staros server under vmware, This is the Virtual machine I spent 30 dollars upgrading today. I am not running ANY staros instances, virtual or on hardware that I do not have proper licences for. This is the way we do business .

1/ may I have a refund on this please

2/ In the past we have worked with you guys on issues surrounding OSPF, the ability to run on Vmware workstation was invaluable at the time as part of the diagnosis process. Vmware workstation may again prove a useful diagnostic platform in the future.

3/ Since Vmware virtual machines cannot (of course!) have radio cards, are you really loosing significant revenue to folks running more copies of staros under vmware than they have paid for.

.brendan

[lonnie]

The license has been refunded.

OK
Will you refund my recent licence upgrade since that was for our Vmware server, it's the X86 upgrade on our westnet account

Care to disclose why you won't support Vmware?

We are using vmware server to virtulise much of our network edge since it allows us good use of hardware resources combined with the ability to have a great deal of fault tolerance.
It's also very useful for testing.

[tony]

You do have a valid point. I will discuss this with Lonnie.

3/ Since Vmware virtual machines cannot (of course!) have radio cards, are you really loosing significant revenue to folks running more copies of staros under vmware than they have paid for.

.brendan

[bminish]

The license has been refunded.

Thankyou

[ninedd]

How about adding support for the Tulip 21140 and the Nat Semi DP8381 ethernet controllers. These are the most common chipsets for multiport ethernet cards these days. This would allow us to make some really awesome routers.Hi. Are these the best value / performance in Multiport Ethernet's for StarOS? I'm in Canada and looking for some multi-port card info / prices / availability please. Thank you.

[olebno]

One advantage of running under VMWare is in tutoring situations.

With a laptop and VMWare you could run 3-5 virtual Star-OS routers as an example, and be able to demonstrate different aspects in routng or filtering etc. without dragging a truckload of hardware with you for the session.


Best Regards
Oleb

[crazydart]

I think its really sad you are not going to support VMWare. I was just looking over downloadable appliences on their site and I said to my self... "Self; wouldnt it be great if we could download StarOS in VM form and run that?" I have been a long time customer, and bought several copies back several years ago. I figured it was about time to upgrade, and I must put this in as VMs. I have to say I am SHOCKED your solution to your problem is to NOT SUPPORT this setup at all when this could very well be a new market for you. I am very sad about this, and I know just from reading you have already lost business from it. In a market that needs inovative minds, you have closed the door on the problem and the solution. Hint of the solution, if you try to install a VM server on a VM, it can tell and wont let you do it... so their must be a way to tell it within the VM (Guest) it is VM, thus you could require some type of activation or lock it to the host... or even require a USB dongle (that should be supported here in the next VMWare version). I am sure the VM software venders have ideas they would be willing to discuss with you. Please considder it. As a programmer my self, I know how much time and money is involved in preventing piracy, and rightly so, but software companies need to realize that VMs are here to stay... Microsoft even wrote it into their liscensing for Windows 2003 R2. The next version of Server will support hypervisor (virtualization) natively. People who want to pirate your stuff, will likely come up with a way around such a simple solution as not including the driver.

[tog]

StarOS/V3 does not seem to make much sense for use in VMs for anything except toying around with virtual routing labs using multiple VMs and you can do that for free with StarV3. The major thing StarV3 does NOT do without a paid license is provide atheros support. You wont get that in a VM anyway.

Can you perhaps explain why and in what situation you would be running StarOS/V3 in a VM?

[tony]

We do not explicitly forbid the use of vmWare, however it is not a platform that we officially support, or recommend.

The Free Edition (routing, etc.) should still work in it however, though it's untested.

[synologic]

For future reference, please see VirtualBox which supports emulation of Intel network cards and works perfectly with StarOS. However since you cannot get wireless support either, its quite useless since the power of StarOS stands at the wireless side. Routing and packet filtering you can get with any linux distribution, there's even a JunOS available for VM environments to be used in educational puposes (of course, you cant do any routing with it).

[DrLove73]

There is no need to Virtualize wireless oriented network. How would you emulate atheros driver?

As for routing, StarOS's power over regular linux distribution is simple policy routing available in licensed version, and maybe VDS connection from Laptop to your network across the world.

Actually, it would be nice to have StarOS Virtualbox with wireless support so we can connect to x2 and x4 StarOS networks. Even if we pay for it, it would be excellent tool. I bet Carl will accept to test this and report if and how it can be done.

[lonnie]

We would have to write the Atheros driver to be "virtual" aware. Sorry, but we are not really seeing a lot of demand for this. Most people want "real" Atheros support.

I wonder if we could come up with a virtual AP and virtual Client using a virtual Atheros driver for a virtual Atheros radio card.

[DrLove73]

It was just a thought at the spur of the moment. Virtualbox is able to take over the direct control of the USB devices, like Windows only USB based printer, maybe they know a way of doing something similar with regular interfaces/hardware. Maybe not, who knows.

I was not thinking of virtual interface, but rather assuming control over the real hardware of the host. It would give your customers ability, if technicaly possible, to use that Virtualbox image to use your driver to comunicate with their network without you creating windows or general linux driver.

You could ask Virtualbox developers if they will be able to something in that direction, that is all.

[klyne]

Hey Guys,

The skinny: Support for Intel 82574L GbE LAN on the MSI-IM-945GSE motherboard.

We have issues with the metro board not having enough processing power to handle the load we require, so we replaceing them with X86 systems, still running StarOS. But we would like to have a fanless Mini ITX board with dual NICs (100 or GB does not matter), so we went hunting and found a nice one that we like... it loads up StarOS no problem but no NICs.

http://www.mini-box.com/MSI-IM-945GSE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard?sc=8&category=100

What are the chances of support for these NICs?

Regards,

Martin Madsen

Bel Air Internet

[DrLove73]

As I can see, they are supported in latest e1000 driver. Tony will have to find a time to recompile it and add it to some of the following versions.

[klyne]

Ok,

Sounds like its "just" updating a generic driver. Assuming its already included in the package.

So how about it Tony? Are you in a pleasing mood?

Martin Madsen

[tony]

I will look at the latest Intel e100 and e1000 driver, and see about incorporating them in an upcoming release.

[Elshar]

That actually reminds me, when I went to rebuild one of our tower sites a few months ago I consolidated a few routers after an incredibly old X86 V2 system died.

The dual-port GigE ethernet I was going to put in it would only show up on a hard reboot. So if someone did a reboot command via the StarOS menu at 3am thinking they were being smart, it'd have required a visit to that tower. I know it wasn't the hardware, I had FreeBSD 6.2 on it hours before and no problems. I might've even had debian on that system as well without issues. I'll have to get the model number and also see if it's still doing it.

Which brings us to, what version of the linux kernel is currently being used? 2.6.21? I do know that a couple GigE cards I wanted to use lately needed 2.6.22/24 before they'd work.

[lonnie]

FYI, the kernel version shows on kernel message log on first boot.

[Stratolinks]

I was running the server version on a board with dual Dual Intel® 82573L PCIe GbE controllers. We temporarily had it in place for 4 months continuous running 1.3.23b doing our connection limiting for 9 class c address spaces. It was removed when we put a new system (2.8GHz quad core) running a full blown linux install for our traffic shaping and connection limiting.

[pops]

Hope this is in the right place
trying to get a vds server up
I have an dual xeon Tyan mobo with I7500 chip set using ide>cf adapter for boot device
the server boots but I get an error

i8xx TCO timer: failed to reset NO_REBOOT flag, reboot disabled by hardware

can somone advise me as how to correct this isue

Pops

[Stratolinks]

Hope this is in the right place
trying to get a vds server up
I have an dual xeon Tyan mobo with I7500 chip set using ide>cf adapter for boot device
the server boots but I get an error

i8xx TCO timer: failed to reset NO_REBOOT flag, reboot disabled by hardware

can somone advise me as how to correct this isue

Pops

You are just too impatient. ;)

Just wait about 5 minutes and the board will continue to boot. It has something to do with the watchdog in the intel chipset, not sure of the details, but I have seen the message many times before.

[pops]

thanks for the reply Stratolinks, I went after a glass of tea ( about 50 yard walk ) and came back and it still said the same thing so I gave up got a different board which seems to boot good and looks to me to be sound.

but I seem to be having a license key problem now, the license key server wanted either the request key or the mac so I keyed in the mac and it took my money and gave me a license key that does not work,

what pray tell have I done wrong now

Pops

[tog]

Perhaps you used the wrong MAC address? Like a MAC address off a wireless card or ether2 or something?

You need to feed it the MAC address of ether1 for your license to be generated properly.

I would suggest generating and using the request key rather than MAC address to avoid any possible confusion.

[DrLove73]

He used on-board ethernet for license since on-board NIC's are on by default.

pops, If you need mobility between MB's, first disable on-board NIC('s), add PCI NIC you will always combine with CF card for license and use request key to generate proper license.

[pops]

Thanks Tog
I now know what I did wrong, I purchased a StarOS license and not a V3 license.

so I added funds to the account and purchsed the correct license, I now have a licensed server.

maybe if I apoligise for my ignorance, Lonnie would be so kind as to refund the improper license fee


Pops

[lonnie]

Refund was issued.

[pops]

Thanks Lonnie

Drlove73 I did disable the on board nic in the bios before I licensed the software, so that I can go to another mobo if this one fails.

I don't have much experience with cf memory I have three different ones here as well as two different adapters/writers one pcmcia & a USB , they all work the same as far as using them in the laptop, I can write read and format , but when I try to load up and boot Star V3 they all act differently, I have one cf that will boot in one mobo and not another
I have another cf that I wrote out with the same card writer using physdiskwright and it will boot in either one of the boards that I am testing, so I am headed to town today to get a couple more cf cards maybe a different brand.

Pops

[DrLove73]

StarOS boot disk/cf must be set as primary disk when booting (hda in linux terms). Mobo's have to work in native IDE, avoid all SATA/simulated IDE controllers.

[klyne]

Tony,

Will you please post to the "changelog" for a new release, when you have updated the e100 and/or the e1000 drivers?

That way i dont have to bug you in every release tread.

Regards,

Martin Madsen
Bel Air Internet

[tony]

When something such as this changes, it will be listed in the release notes.

[klyne]

Hey Tony / Lonnie,

Any movement on the new e1000 intel drivers? the metro boards cant handle the loads we subject them to. Please advise.

Redrads,

Martin Madsen
Bel Air Internet

[Stratolinks]

What is supposedly wrong with the current Intel Pro 1000 drivers?

I have about 8 systems in place that have on-board Pro 1000 that are working just fine. Each of these only have the local AP traffic passing through the Ethernet up to the AP. The radios on these provide the backbone links.

[klyne]

nothing wrong, but the NICs in our newer MBs from Intel are not supported. And since the most powerful embedded platform (Metro) is not powerful enough we need a Fanless ITX as replacement. We found one that we like but as i said the Intel NICs are not supported yet.

MM

[DrLove73]

Are you apsolutely sure that you have Intel NIC on your ITX board? A lot of ITX boards have new Realtek NIC's actually, even the Intel Atom ones.

Intel drivers are moslty forward compatible (older drivers mostly work with new NIC's, but Realtek NIC's almost always need newest drivers to work.

What is the exact model you bought?

[Stratolinks]

I have a couple of these (http://www.icpamerica.com/products/single_board_computers/Half-Size/pisa/pcisa_9652.html) with dual core 2.4GHz CPU, running V3 Server. They have "Dual Intel® 82573L PCIe GbE controllers" and they work fine.

I also have a half dozen of these (http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/HS-870P.HTM) with 2GHz CPUs that have Intel on-board "Intel 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller".

We have fans that have been running 6 years 24/7 and despite the fact that I replaced them this year anyway, they were still running fine. The key thing is choice of a proper fan from RPM to CFM to bearing size etc. I found a great deal on a bunch of fans once that were supposed to be great, but they didn't last more than a few months. You truly get what you pay for in fans. The large fans for use in our router boxes cost me nearly $40.00 each, but I know I won't have to replace them again until I decide they are too old and want to replace them.


nothing wrong, but the NICs in our newer MBs from Intel are not supported. And since the most powerful embedded platform (Metro) is not powerful enough we need a Fanless ITX as replacement. We found one that we like but as i said the Intel NICs are not supported yet.

MM

[klyne]

Here is the board.

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/ms_9830

2 Intel 82574L 10/100/1000

Thanks,

MM

[DrLove73]

http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/E1000E.html
http://vyatta.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2320&sid=4183e216df861b94804337fb023a5600

It seams that driver form 2.6.30 kernel (or newer) must be used for proper functioning of 82574L NIC.