[asterisk-users] Mini-ITX board + FXO PCI card?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Vincent Delporte wrote:

> At 10:09 11/02/2007 -0500, Gordon Henderson wrote:
>> Check the processor spec. carefully. [...] Also make sure you compile 
>> asterisk for an i586
>
> OK, I'll make sure it has enough cache and I'll recompile the code myself. 
> I'm thinking of getting an ML 8000 
> http://via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=301 
> .
>
> At 10:09 11/02/2007 -0500, Manny A. Wise wrote:
>> I did, and I was NOT happy with the results... Mini-itx have a serious 
>> problems with IRQ sharing... I am happily using a embeded system now, but 
>> the FXO and FXS have to be external.
>
> Those boards only come with one PCI slot. Do you mean it could share an IRQ 
> with some embedded component like the video card?

On the CN1000 boards I'm using, the PCI slot seems tobe locked to IRQ10.

The on-board USB hardware also seems to be wired to IRQ 10 )-:

Using the BIOS to "reserve" IRQ 10 caused the on-board USB hardware to 
move to IRQ5 on the old VIA 533MHz boards I use for R&D, but not on the 
new CN1000 boards. You'll need to experiment with this on the EX board...

So I disable the on-board USB device, and have a custom compiled kernel 
that doesn't include USB drivers.

However, on a test board, I did leave USB enabled with a kernel that 
supproted USB just to test - an - well - it "just works" - however I only 
planned to use USB to perform an upgrade, so the times it would be in-use 
would be so minimal as to (hopefully) not have an issue.

On an older 533MHz board:

$ cat /proc/interrupts
            CPU0
   0:   48124962          XT-PIC  timer
   2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
   5:          0          XT-PIC  uhci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2
   7:          1          XT-PIC  acpi
   8:          4          XT-PIC  rtc
  11:      75120          XT-PIC  eth0
  12:   48084364          XT-PIC  wctdm
  14:       2763          XT-PIC  ide0
  15:       5373          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0
LOC:          0
ERR:          0
MIS:          0

$ /sbin/zttest
Opened pseudo zap interface, measuring accuracy...
...
--- Results after 42 passes ---
Best: 100.000000 -- Worst: 99.987793 -- Average: 99.995350

> BTW, in this age of big USB drive, I don't really nee a DVD/CDRW combo. Does 
> someone know if the Via motherboards (at least the ML series) supports 
> booting off a USB drive, so I can use this to start Linux and fetch install 
> files from an FTP server?

I've not tried it (I boot them off a flash IDE device I create on a host 
system), but can't you just temporarily plug in a CD drive to do the 
install (onto a local IDE/SATA drive) then unplug it & put the lid back 
on? Thats how I build some of my servers... (Although the CD drive is an 
IDE drive these days for speed...)

Gordon