Asus Eee PC

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

Tasks

Task

Status

Responsible

Fix ACPI battery information

Done

rpaulo

Add missing pieces to acpi_asus(4) (hotkeys!)

Committed

rpaulo

Ethernet driver (ae(4))

Under development

stas

Fix snd_hda(4) resume path

TBD

TBD (kmacy)

Fix Synaptics touchpad resume path

TBD

TBD (kmacy)

Implement PCIE hotplug support [1]

TBD

TBD (rpaulo)

Hardware Monitoring

In development

rpaulo

Wireless driver for 901 (ral(4))

In development

thompsa

L1 ethernet driver for 901

TBD

TBD

[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

If you get write errors or your system hangs when writing to the SD/SDHC card, 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

900

901

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:

What doesn't work:

Attansic L2 FastEthernet

As of 24 June 2008 ae(4) driver is mostly complete, receive/transmit works pretty stable. There're some things to be polished out, though.

Get the driver at: http://www.SpringDaemons.com/stas/if_ae.diff.2008081800

Atheros L1 FastEthernet

This one is second generation of L1 controller which is supposed to be heavily modified by Atheros after acquiring Attansic. This controller uses different bits/meaning in register layouts and seems to use different descriptor formats. This is not supported by the age(4) driver.

Atheros Wireless LAN

This WiFi card requires a new HAL. Get it from http://people.freebsd.org/~sam/ath_hal-20080528.tgz . Unpack the tarball and move the contents of the ath_hal-20080528 directory to /usr/src/sys/contrib/dev/ath.

After that, rebuild your kernel.

You should see something like:

ath_hal: 0.10.5.6 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, AR5416, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413, RF2133, RF2425, RF2417)

in your dmesg.

Touchpad (synaptics) configuration

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

Fetch and install http://people.freebsd.org/~rpaulo/eeemon.tgz. This module creates dev.cpu.0.temperature and dev.cpu.0.fan (note that this is different from ACPI).

References

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

AsusEee (last edited 2008-08-25 21:30:59 by DmitryMarakasov)