In the past months we came across a variety of issues that we wanted to discuss with the company that came up with the Mini-ITX form-factor and the EPIA boards. In the past weeks we also collected our readers’ questions and included them in this interview.
EpiaCenter.com features an interview with VIA’s Werner du Plessis.
I’m somewhat excited.
The possibilities offered by this platform are quite impressive and haven’t even been tapped yet.
Most people build small media boxes or routers with them. I think the EPIA-n will open the door for some pretty cool clusters because of their small size, for example.
If only their PCI performance weren’t sub-par.
I’ve always been rather impressed with the mini – itx form factor, that said, their four cpu atx board is quite an interesting proposition.
What is VIA’s perspective of the open-source scene? Many developers have been complaining about VIA’s lacklustre attitude towards supplying drivers and information which is needed in order for EPIAs to run properly on operating systems such as Linux. Don’t you think that this could result in bigger acceptance and increased sales? Is VIA planning to review their open-source efforts, and will we be seeing closer work with open source developers in the future?
VIA is working closely with the open source community in developing drivers and new applications for low power VIA processor platforms through community websites and support portals such as VIAArena.com. The majority of these drivers are developed by VIA – as apposed to merely providing source code for others to develop drivers
I have no idea what that means. Maybe he meant to say “documentation”. Primarily, VIA is supposed to provide the hardware specs so anyone can develop drivers. Providing code is of course also great.
– and the complete drivers are freely available from the VIAArena.com drivers section.
As in freedom or beer?
VIA’s current official Linux distributions support includes Red Hat, Fedora Core and Mandrake Linux. We also support various Linux distributions by request, including SuSE, Red Flag, Slackware, Linspire, Debian etc. Additionally, VIA develops SDKs for Linux users to integrate support for innovative new technologies, such as hardware based MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 acceleration in the VIA CN400 chipset or the VIA PadLock Hardware Security Suite built into Nehemiah core VIA processors.
VIA also provides documentation and support to independent Linux developers who make direct contact with VIA, on a regular basis, under non disclosure agreements and support several Linux applications with free download on both the SourceForge and Open Foundry community, including the VIA PadLock SDK, VIA PadLock ZIP and VIA VeX.
I would’ve liked for the interviewee to provide a link to their “we want GNU/Linux running on our hardware” page. I’d like to build a little teency weencie box to run debian on, but am still just poking around http://www.mini-itx.com for the time being. Anyone have any direct experience here with Linux on EPIA?
I’ve been using Via systems for a number of years for different commercial projects. The company I now work for builds Via-based settopboxes (albeit with different motherboard design) and headend devices. I’ve never had any major problems with their motherboards running Linux. The only problem they have right now is that their Padlock supports a good datarate on the chip but the system architecture cripples it. My 2c.
I used to run an EPIA 533 back in the day, but the graphics/sound/network chips on the board were SO CHEAP that working just wasn’t fun (now my iBook is a nice equally quiet (quasi-fanless) replacement).
If they ever include reliable Ethernet, and graphics/sound of acceptable signal-quality, and the ability to maybe watch a movie even on the fanless versions (my iBook delivers), then I might consider getting a Home-Linux/BSD-Box again in the future.
Ulrich
just build an MII 6000 box, lots of fun, runs fedora and ubuntu. mostly using to play music, with the music player displaying on my powerbook (ydl 4) screen over ssh over a wireless network. its like a $1500 remote control, or a $300 airport express depending how you look at it.
sam
I use a Hush-PC (Epia M10000) based system as my main desktop machine. It’s no game machine, but can do fairly well using the xorg cvs drivers.
No fan, utterly quiet unless the (also quiet, but not silent) harddrive seeks around a bit.
If it weren’t for the hd, and the cd writer, this would make no noise at all.
Via’s open source engagement is quite bad I’d say. Problem is that they’re always doing “their own” thing, never really integrating there work into the appropriate project AND they refuse to give you register level specs without requierung you to sign an NDA.
For more information see this (older) thread on ViaArena:
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=28&threadid=60342&…
However thanks to the OSS community most features will work flawless. No problem are sound, firewire, longhaul, usb. If you wan’t to use the MPEG2 acceleration feature it is more problematic. You can use VIAs drivers and media players, but they are known to have bugs and their software often works with very old distributions only. For the graphics side if Epia I’d rather recommend the unichrome project
http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/
There are more or less reverse engineering VIAs efforts doing everything as VIA should have done it in the first place.
Another thing where you MIGHT need patching your kernel is hardware sensors support, but I thing that’s not all that important. For my board (CL8000A) I needed this patch (1211)
http://hem.bredband.net/ekmlar/vt1211.html
but even now the output of sensors doesn’t make that much sense
Hi Ulrich,
I have an EPIA M10000, and can play DVDs full-screen using TV out just as well as a DVD player can. The M series (with CLE266 northbridge) has a well supported MPEG 2 decoder. (I also have a fanless Hush M10000 as my desktop machine, but I’m thinking of switching to a Lex “Light” PC [book sized, fanless, can boot of CF] and using this as a TiVo).
Ralph
ulrich to me represent the kind of apple user that makes me thing about mediaphiles (basicly those that buy overkill video and audio hardware for home use). maybe they are one and the same? i dont know, buy why do you need studio quality hardware at home i wonder…
For more information see this (older) thread on ViaArena:
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=28&threadid=60…
Thanks for the informative link Sebastian.
Huh? No.
My iBook is not studio-quality, but unlike the EPIA it can play all kinds of video without stutters, has working TV-out and VGA-out that doesn’t look like total crap, plays sound without every harddisk access inducing sound flickers and can Ethernet at 8MB/s without causing the net-driver to slow down immensely and writing 100s of “transmit aborted” (something like that) messages to my syslog.
that post was more informative on what you found wrong about the epia then the previous one. still, it could be down to faulty drivers. but i can atleast see why you switched it…
The thing with hearing the harddrive was an issue with the old boards. The EPIA faster than 533 Mhz don’t have that issue. My EPIA 600Mhz dons’t. It’s not the greatest for desktop apps, but it’s great as a personal server at home.
As in freedom or beer?
I love when you people say that.. Do you even know what it takes for you to have and keep that freedom? You all use it like its completely free….
I wouldn’t choose VIA for my next project, but the reason is more moral than technical. See the link Sebastian S. posted for the whole story. I bought the board a year ago, and it is first now that I’ve been able to use it with the software currently in CVS.
Now I do have a nice working EPIA-M 1000 setup:
I bought the Chyang Fun MiniCube M
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=3#minicubem
the PSU was to loud so I ripped it out and bought the Lex 120W PSU and DC-DC Converter Kit
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=10#p1806
to use this kit some small amount of violent case modding is required…
Also the fan on the board was disturbing me so I replaced it with a Zalman Silent Motherboard Heatsink
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=9#p2303
With this sink I did a full emerge -e world (~72 hours of compiling) without problems, so I’m fairly confident that it is sufficient.
When I removed the fan I noticed that a complete moron must have assebled it as the thremal paste was a 1-2mm thick blob of the die. Make sure to follow the instructions when reapplying ex.
http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm
Using xorg (6.8) & xine (1_rc7) and a patched gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9-r8
It functions as a dvd/movie player but dubbles as dns/www/mlnet/dhcp/mail server…
the next release of xorg will have support for harware accelerated mpeg2 decoding through xvmc (or xxmc) using the unichrome drivers.
I have to chuckle over the people whining and complaining because they purchased the cheapest possible components they could find, yet they didn’t meet their high expectations for workmanship and features. Give me a break!
If you buy a $30 mainboard and a $30 Sempron CPU, and the cheapest possible whatever, yes.
But we’re talking here about the only affordable “embedded” board, that didn’t really drop in price since introduced 2 years ago, and that at $150+ isn’t ultra-cheap.
It’s sad that companies these days try to rip you off and put the crappiest piece they can find whereever the *typical* customer won’t look, just to save maybe $1 on that one board/PC/etc.
The VIA ITX is not an embedded board. It is a all-in-one compact factor x86 board – that’s why the price is more. If you took the SBC model where half the interfaces are not needed, the board would drop significantly in price. The BOM for a SBC embedded board with the same level of I/O ports and functionality is almost around the same price as the VIA.