Asus Eee PC

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

Contents

  1. Asus Eee PC
  2. Tasks
  3. General notes (please READ!)
    1. SD card reader problems (70x model only)
  4. Hardware
    1. 701
    2. 701 SE (special edition)
    3. 900
    4. 900A
    5. 900HD
    6. 901
    7. 1000
    8. 1000H
    9. 1000HE
    10. 1005HA
    11. 1015PD
    12. 1018P
    13. 1201N
    14. 1215N
    15. S101
  5. Installation procedure
  6. Suspend/resume
  7. Attansic L2 FastEthernet
  8. Atheros L1 FastEthernet
  9. Atheros AR8131/AR8132 Gigabit Ethernet
  10. Atheros Wireless LAN
  11. Touchpad (synaptics) configuration
  12. Hotkeys
  13. Hardware monitor

Tasks

Task

Status

Responsible

Fix ACPI battery information

Done

rpaulo

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

Done

rpaulo

Ethernet driver (ae(4))

Done

stas

Fix snd_hda(4) resume path

Done

dumbbell

Fix Synaptics touchpad resume path

TBD

TBD (kmacy)

Implement PCIE hotplug support [1]

TBD

TBD

Hardware Monitoring

In development

rpaulo

Wireless driver for 901 (rt2860) [2]

-

-

L1 ethernet driver for 901

Done

yongari

[1] - Needed for Fn + F2 operation to enable/disable wireless. [2] - An experimental driver for the Ralink 2860 chipset is available at the ralink_drivers.git repository. See also this topic at the FreeBSD foums.

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 (70x model only)

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

701 SE (special edition)

900

For snd_hda on 8.0 / current you'll need the following hint for the headphone/speakers detection to work properly: 

hint.hdac.0.cad0.nid21.config="as=1 seq=15"

in /boot/device.hints.

900A

For snd_hda on 8.0 / current you'll need the following hint for the headphone/speakers detection to work properly: 

hint.hdac.0.cad0.nid21.config="as=1 seq=15"

in /boot/device.hints. Otherwise, only the speakers work and headphones don't work at all (and plugging in the headphones doesn't turn off the speakers).

900HD

901

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

1000

1000H

1000HE

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

1005HA

1015PD

1018P

1201N

1215N

S101

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

Installation procedure

The easiest way to install FreeBSD on an eee is to use the USB memory stick image. Transfer this to the memory stick with dd: 

dd if=FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=10240 conv=sync

taking extreme care that the device name (/dev/da0 in the example) is correct. The memory stick image is available under /pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/8.0/. Alternative, you can build 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"

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

The ae(4) driver first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1.

Atheros L1 FastEthernet

This one is second generation of L1 controller which is supposed to be heavily modified by Atheros after acquiring Attansic. It supports the AR8121, AR8113 and AR8114.

The driver first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1.

Atheros AR8131/AR8132 Gigabit Ethernet

The driver first appaered in FreeBSD 8.0.

Atheros Wireless LAN

See per-model notes.

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/asus.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).

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Laptops/Asus_Eee (last edited 2018-07-21T03:43:30+0000 by MarkLinimon)