ALIX 2D13It’s a good thing I waited a few days before releasing my next ALIX-post. I was gonna talk about the leds-alix module and where to download it, but in the meantime 2.6.35 was released and already contains all the necessary code. So, besides this post there is a new config: Linux 2.6.35 vanilla for ALIX 2D13. A few changes to the 2.6.34-config I posted last time:

  • I didn’t choose the Geode GL/GX last time, doh!
  • The kernel is no longer tickless (performs better)
  • Threw out some modular crypto-stuff (which I missed the last time)

There are three front-LEDs on the ALIX board, so nothing fancy. The interesting is that there are predefined triggers for these LEDs in /sys/class/leds/ which will make the LEDs display one of the following: heartbeat = load average (blinking speed), ide-disk (write access to the cf-card), timer, etc. Just try cat trigger to see the possible values. There is also the possibility to trigger on matches from iptables (think: traffic on port 22 ;). However my iptables userland seems to be outdated, so I will have to report about this another time.

LighttpdFurthermore I tried using lighttpd instead of gatling on my fat external drive, and it performed even better, using slightly less CPU. In the kernel I activated the deadline IO-scheduler as default (while keeping CFQ and NOOP as an option), let’s see how that plays out. I’m still not getting more than 9MB/s using Samba, while the CPU is mostly idle and lighty completely saturates the 100MBit link, really annoying.

lm_sensors on the ALIX are no problem either. Just try my kernel-config or make sure to activate the basic I2C-stuff and CONFIG_SCx200_ACB. My ALIX runs at comfy 42°C when not under load.

I already talked about using tmpfs for some of the directories written to frequently (/tmp, /var/tmp, /var/run, /var/log, /var/lock). I don’t care about logs right now, so I don’t mind losing them on reboot. Some daemons however complain or won’t start if their log-directories aren’t set up, so you should do that with an init-script. I uploaded my script here, which will work with Debian and also sets up two LEDs and the deadline scheduler in case it isn’t the default.