• AsusEee

Asus Eee PC

This page describes FreeBSD support for the Asus line of subnotebooks, Eee PC.

Tasks

[1] - Needed for Fn + F2 operation.

General notes (please READ!)

Some users found that enabling powerd causes sudden reboots and problems with the SD card and/or external devices. The problem may lie in acpi_throttle(4). Please don't enable powerd or disable acpi_throttle in your loader.conf on the 701. If you disable acpi_throttle, powerd is useless because the Eee PC 701 CPU has no Enhanced Speedstep support.

SD card reader problems

Some users found that using the eeemon(4) kernel driver and enabling "high voltage" (sysctl dev.eeemon.0.voltage=1) makes some SD/SDHC cards functional. The error/success on this behavior depends on the card itself.

Another thing to do if you get write errors or your system hangs when writing to the SD/SDHC card is to try changing the BIOS setting of "OS Installation" to "Start". The following should change in your dmesg:

da0: 40.000MB/s transfers

to:

da0: 1.000MB/s transfers

This may not make the problem go away entirely, but makes it less problematic.

Hardware

701

• Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (630.07-MHz 686-class CPU)

• ath(4): Atheros 5424/2424

• ae(4): Attansic L2 FastEthernet

• acpi_asus(4)

• acpi_video(4)

701 SE (special edition)

• Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (897.76-MHz 686-class CPU)
• 8GB SSD

• Atheros/Attansic AR81xx PCIe Gigabit Ethernet (ale(4))

• Realtek Wireless (not supported)

900

• Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (900.10-MHz 686-class CPU)

• ath(4): Atheros 5424/2424

• ae(4): Attansic L2 FastEthernet

• acpi_asus(4)

• acpi_video(4)

900HD

• Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (900.10-MHz 686-class CPU)
• Realtek RTL8187SE Wireless LAN PCIE Network Adapter (not supported)

• ale(4) Atheros L1 FastEthernet

• acpi_asus(4)
• acpi_video(4)

901

• Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 1.60GHz (1600.01-MHz 686-class CPU)

• ral(4): Ralink 2860

• ale(4) Atheros L1 FastEthernet

• acpi_asus(4)

• acpi_video(4)

A customized kernel configuration EEE_HEAD is available, this should result in this dmesg-v-20081216-eee901.txt dmesg output. This system is cross-compiled on another host with environment settings TARGET=TARGET_ARCH=i386 and make.conf variable CPUTYPE?=prescott

1000H

• Same as 901, but with a 10 inch. screen.

1000HE

Configurations are said to vary, especially wrt wireless modules. Some users report Ralink cards.

• Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N280 1.66GHz (1662.51-MHz 686-class CPU)

• ale(4) Atheros L1 FastEthernet

• ath(4): Atheros 5424/2424 (AW-GE780)

• ng_ubt(4): Broadcom BT-253 (AW-BT253)

• acpi_asus(4)

• acpi_video(4)

• snd_hda(4): Intel 82801G

• 160GB HDD (Hitachi)

S101

• Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 1.60GHz (1600.01-MHz 686-class CPU)

• ale(4) Atheros L1 FastEthernet

• acpi_asus(4)

• acpi_video(4)

• Wireless Atheros (not supported yet) class=0x028000 card=0x10671a3b chip=0x002a168c rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
• Suspend/resume doesn't work (hangs) after

acpi_acad0: unknown notify 0x81
ale0: 2 link states coalesced
ad0: FAILURE - SET_MULTI status=51<READY,DCS,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED>

Installation procedure

Perhaps the most easy way to install FreeBSD on the Eee is to build HEAD or RELENG_7 from source. A detailed procedure is explained at http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2007/10/building-bootable-freebsdi386-images.html . This builds "Live Pen Drive" version of FreeBSD.

Pressing "Escape" on the BIOS boot screen allows you to select the boot device. After a sucessful boot, install FreeBSD on the SSD by typing (WARNING: this erases your SSD!):

# fdisk -I ad2
# fdisk -B ad2
# bsdlabel -w ad2s1 auto
# bsdlabel -B ad2s1
# newfs -U /dev/ad2s1a
# mount /dev/ad2s1a /mnt
# cp -Rp /COPYRIGHT /.cshrc /.profile /b* /etc /home /l* /sbin /r* /usr /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/dev /mnt/tmp
# chmod 1777 /mnt/tmp 

Add the following to your /etc/fstab:

/dev/ad2s1a             /               ufs     rw,noatime      1       1
tmpfs                   /tmp            tmpfs   rw,size=20000000        0       0

This creates a 20Mb tmpfs file system on /tmp.

Don't forget to add this to your /boot/loader.conf:

snd_hda_load="YES"
acpi_asus_load="YES"
tmpfs_load="YES"

hw.pci.do_power_nodriver=1
kern.hz=100

Suspend/resume

Basic stuff works. What you need to make it work/caveats:

• hw.acpi.reset_video=1 (add it to /etc/sysctl.conf)

• Most likely you'll also want hw.acpi.sleep_button_state=S3 so that the sleep button actually suspends.

• The LCD is off after resuming. To fix that, change the brightness level by hand or add sysctl hw.acpi.asus.lcd_brightness=8 to /etc/rc.resume (after the kldunload comment).

• Make sure you umount the SD or SDHC card before suspending. The Eee will detach the USB card reader on suspend and reattach it on resume.

What doesn't work:

• snd_hda(4) has no resume support. You have to kldunload it before suspend and kldload it after resume.

• ae(4) WOL support was not tested.

Attansic L2 FastEthernet

The driver has been committed to HEAD. Expect an MFC after 7.1 is out.

Atheros L1 FastEthernet

This one is second generation of L1 controller which is supposed to be heavily modified by Atheros after acquiring Attansic.

The driver has been committed to HEAD, http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-all/2008-November/001172.html

Atheros Wireless LAN

See per-model notes.

Touchpad (synaptics) configuration

• Disable moused in rc.conf
• Add hw.psm.synaptics_support=1 to loader.conf
• pkg_add -r xf86-input-synaptics and edit Xorg.conf according to xf86-input-synaptics's pkg-message

Hotkeys

Update to latest HEAD or RELENG_7 and make sure you have acpi_asus(4) loaded. The following should show up on dmesg:

acpi_asus0: <ASUS EeePC> on acpi0

After that, the hotkeys should work out-of-the-box. If you don't like how we configured them in /etc/devd.conf, edit that file and suit it to your preferences.

Hardware monitor

eeemon(4) is a hardware monitor and tunable for your Eee. With it, you can monitor the temperature and the fan speed. You can also alternate between High/Low voltage and control the fan speed.

Fetch and install http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/user/rpaulo/eeemon/ . This module creates dev.cpu.0.temperature and dev.cpu.0.fan (note that this is from a different source than ACPI, but the value is usually the same).

References

1. http://nighthack.org/wiki/EeeBSD