From my last article you can find that I unsuccessfully tried to boot NetBSD and OpenBSD on the Jetway JNF76-N1G-LF P motherboard. MirOS BSD booted ok (with some conditions like IDE option instead of RAID) and I was planning to use it for NAS. However, MirOS BSD didn't support integrated 1GbE network interface (Realtek 8111C). I bought Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI card to solve this, however, it didn't work too. Realtek 8139D 10/100 network interface worked ok but it was not Gigabit. So I decided to try FreeBSD as last hope for BSDs. It installed without any problems and detected hardware (without RAID mode), however, the first boot was unsuccessful. It couldn't mount root partition for some reason. As I didn't want to spend more time on that any more I had decided to give up on BSDs.
So, I decided to use Debian (stable 5.0 release AMD64 port) on my NAS server. It installed without any problems (I used base packages ISO with some packages downloaded from internet). It booted with RAID option on and detected all my hard drives without problems (update: problems appeared later, read about RAID mode below). FFS partition mounted in read-only mode too. However, the problem began here. I tried to copy all data from FFS partition to EXT3 (in other drive). Copy process was very slow for some reason (3MB/s). I don't know if it's a kernel problem but the fact was that I had needed 3 days to copy all data (about 800MB). Later Intel Pro/1000 GT went to 10MBit/s mode. I used ethtool to set up it correctly once again.
The speed always goes down than I uploading/downloading something from samba, but it ends up for about 7-9MB/s. It is not very good and I think the main reason for this is slow copying I mentioned earlier. I’ll try to change a kernel to a newer version and I’ll try Realtek 8111C in the future too. Despite this problems, Debian works very stable. I think this ends up my efforts to set up NAS on JNF76-N1G-LF P motherboard. I hope I’ll solve last problems in the future. In conclusion I can say, that this motherboard is not suitable for BSD platforms for now. If you want to use it like a server you need to use Linux. VX800 is not supported by BSD systems.
Update (2009-12-22)
I recompiled the kernel to 2.6.32.2 (from 2.6.26-2). It didn't helped to solve a copy process problems but I figured out that for some reason dma had been disabled (hdparm utility). It seemed that hard drives had been working at PIO mode. So it wasn't unexpected that copy speed hadn't exceeded 3-5 MB/s. As hdparm -d1 didn't work (I got an error that permission to do this was denied) I disabled RAID (AHCI) in BIOS once again. DMA was enabled automatically after restart.
As I didn't try real RAID in any configuration I don't know what problems you could get from this. It seems that VX800 RAID is not very well supported too (or it is not enabled in kernel, but I didn't find any separate options instead of default VIA SATA modules which was used with other VIA chipsets). After that everything works like a charm. Copy speed is good and what is more I got constant ~50MB/s through samba during download/upload process. I didn't have such speeds with my VT-310DP and NetBSD (as I remember they were between 14-19MB/s and it draws lot of questions why it was so then). So I can be finally happy with my NAS server. Last thing I'll try to compare Intel 1Gbit card with integrated Realtek in the near future. Of course, I'll try to investigate RAID/AHCI matter but that is not a priority now.
So, I decided to use Debian (stable 5.0 release AMD64 port) on my NAS server. It installed without any problems (I used base packages ISO with some packages downloaded from internet). It booted with RAID option on and detected all my hard drives without problems (update: problems appeared later, read about RAID mode below). FFS partition mounted in read-only mode too. However, the problem began here. I tried to copy all data from FFS partition to EXT3 (in other drive). Copy process was very slow for some reason (3MB/s). I don't know if it's a kernel problem but the fact was that I had needed 3 days to copy all data (about 800MB). Later Intel Pro/1000 GT went to 10MBit/s mode. I used ethtool to set up it correctly once again.
The speed always goes down than I uploading/downloading something from samba, but it ends up for about 7-9MB/s. It is not very good and I think the main reason for this is slow copying I mentioned earlier. I’ll try to change a kernel to a newer version and I’ll try Realtek 8111C in the future too. Despite this problems, Debian works very stable. I think this ends up my efforts to set up NAS on JNF76-N1G-LF P motherboard. I hope I’ll solve last problems in the future. In conclusion I can say, that this motherboard is not suitable for BSD platforms for now. If you want to use it like a server you need to use Linux. VX800 is not supported by BSD systems.
Update (2009-12-22)
I recompiled the kernel to 2.6.32.2 (from 2.6.26-2). It didn't helped to solve a copy process problems but I figured out that for some reason dma had been disabled (hdparm utility). It seemed that hard drives had been working at PIO mode. So it wasn't unexpected that copy speed hadn't exceeded 3-5 MB/s. As hdparm -d1
As I didn't try real RAID in any configuration I don't know what problems you could get from this. It seems that VX800 RAID is not very well supported too (or it is not enabled in kernel, but I didn't find any separate options instead of default VIA SATA modules which was used with other VIA chipsets). After that everything works like a charm. Copy speed is good and what is more I got constant ~50MB/s through samba during download/upload process. I didn't have such speeds with my VT-310DP and NetBSD (as I remember they were between 14-19MB/s and it draws lot of questions why it was so then). So I can be finally happy with my NAS server. Last thing I'll try to compare Intel 1Gbit card with integrated Realtek in the near future. Of course, I'll try to investigate RAID/AHCI matter but that is not a priority now.