BA-4000 update

Update to the Atiosys BA-4000. The COM1 generally runs in RS-423/RS-485 mode (have not tried finding out which exactly), while only COM2 to COM4 are RS-232. Now the problem is that COM3 and COM4 are only on-board, i.e. as a pin header, and doing some soldering (a) takes time (b) does not seem to work well with the case and how one opens/closes it. That sucks. Solution is to buy an USB-RS232 adapter, but of course, there's only shitty hardware on the market. Either it is (a) a really odd USB cable (going from USB-A to USB-B first, then to RS-232), (b) too pricey or (c) the ark3116 chip that was in the cables I acquired does only have TX/RX CTS/CTR lines and none of the helpful control lines.

Posted 2007-06-11 13:06 / Tags: Embedded, Hardware, Linux. / link

The BA-4000 semi-embedded device (Box PC)

The Atiosys BA-4000 is some sort of a barebone pc that is well suited for being a management console. With 2 Ethernet LAN jacks, 2 COM ports (a third is said to be available as an onboard pin header), and 4 USB ports, you can connect tons of things to it, ranging from (1) modern servers, controlled via IPMI (Ethernet), (2) servers controlled via RS-232 (COM), e.g. SPARC E250, and if that's not enough, (3) the UPS via USB. Of course, you could always extend it with USB-to-LAN, or USB-to-RS232 converters.

Contains a VIA Eden ESP 7000 processor, yet /proc/cpuinfo and longhaul say it is a Nehemiah C3/C5P/C5XL core. What's not so good is that the CPU frequency switching runs unstable and eventually locks up the whole box, making even Sysrq impossible. It is fanless though, and at 733, the core temperature is about 53 °C, as much as my 2500-RPM fan-cooled (80x80) desktop box w/AMD Athlon XP 2000+ runs at (~51 °C).

As far as storage is concerned, CompactFlash is the preferred way, though an IDE port is also provided inside. And since the guys at Novell cleaned out the stable quite a bit lot, a minimal (I would want to call it "full minimal" because there's so much space left), yet functional install (iptables, ssh, minicom and apcupsd) takes only 333 MB, yes, that's openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 3. I have to admit, I cheated a bit by manually throwing out all directories in /usr/lib/locale that were not de_DE or en_US, which saves a whopping 63 MB. I also killed /usr/share/doc/* and /usr/share/man/* You need to know that I run it on a rather tiny CF card...but I am happy with it.


Filesystem    Type   1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      xfs      508896    333560    175336  66% /

Yeah, I decided to use xfs, in read-write mode (no fancy squashfs-unionfs/aufs combination, there is only limited memory available) on a CF. Let's see how fast that wears out.


cn:~ # dmesg | grep ^Memory
Memory: 237444k/245696k available (1735k kernel code, 7628k reserved, 721k
data, 188k init, 0k highmem)

cn:~ # free
             total   used    free shared buffers cached
Mem:        240212  21124  219088      0       0   6596
-/+ buffers/cache:  14528  225684
Swap:         1016      0    1016

The following sysctls are should help a bit:

/proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio = 90 /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio = 95 /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs = 18000 /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs = 30000 /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode = 1

Another not so good thing is that the VGA memory is shared. By default, the area is set to 64 MB, but heck, what for? I have it at 16 MB (the minimum) so that I have more of the 256 MB DIMM I installed for the operating system. And, the graphical SUSE installer ran, in 1024x768, with these 16 MB set aside for graphics. On the other side, I was prompted to add a bit of swapspace beforehand so the installer starts (it wants 256 MB, not 240). Lacking decent storage, I used some USB flash stick for the course of the install. As you can see above, the running system only uses like 14 megabytes.

Posted 2007-05-04 13:05 / Tags: Embedded, Hardware, Linux. / link