VIA EPIA VT-310DP
My home office is presently occupied by a visitor that has become longer-term than was intended. My home servers also live in my office, and make quite a lot of noise sometimes. It's not that they are huge or particurally loud (although I do have a 4U 4x700MHz (it's an HP NetServer LT 6000r) that spends most of the time turned off), it's just that the noise that they make hasn't mattered until very recently, so I didn't even notice. However, my visitor has trouble sleeping with the constant droning of the servers.
There are several servers, but two are on most of the time. My LDAP server is a Mac Mini that is already nearly silent when the room is cool. My router is pretty loud and is a very old Compaq Presario that has over the years been upgraded to having maxed out the motherboard at 350 MHz and 384 MB RAM. He has been serving me faithfully for nearly ten years, but my guest just can't stand the noise when he's trying to sleep at night, and offered to pay for $400 of a new, quieter server.
My router is my swiss-army server, he does basically everything (except LDAP) that needs to be done. This includes hosting this blog, NFS for home directories for the client machines, DNS, routing, email, Privoxy, backups of other servers and the laptops, you name it. So replacing him with a beefier server is already a good idea. However, finding a suitable replacement turns out to be difficult. He often runs long-running processes that can occupy quite a lot of CPU (and if he had a better CPU, I'd be running them much more often), and I'd like him to still be useable during that time. The easiest way to do that is to just have a second core or CPU. In addition, I do a lot of tests and development of threaded applications, so a second CPU would be ideal.
So a dual-core/CPU quiet (ideally fanless) machine is pretty difficult to find. The Core 2 Duos are slated to come out soon, but my guest can't wait that long. After much searching and many mailing list posts, someone eventually recommended the VIA EPIA VT-310DP motherboard. It can run fanless, and it has two 1GHz (overclockable) CPUs, has onboard Via Padlock hardware-random-number-generator, cryptographic acceleration (which works under FreeBSD's crypto(9) with padlock(4)/crypto(4)/cryptodev(4) compiled in), three NICs, and even some stuff that I won't use, like MPEG4 acceleration.
I was kind of worried at first, since nobody responded a couple of mailing list posts asking if the board worked well under FreeBSD, but I bought it anyway from Logic Supply. When it arrived, on the old server I recompiled my kernel with SMP and the drivers for the network cards, installed that kernel, shut the machine down, moved the hard drives into the new machine, booted, and viola! I had no issues at all booting directly into FreeBSD and seeing both processors, the network cards working, and noticing a significant speed-up. After a couple of days, I gave my old server a proper burial. He served me faithfully for over ten years.
So the new server is just as loud as the old one, so my next project will be to replace the power supply with a "brick"-style one and get the whole lot running fanless.
Here is my kernel config:
And my dmesg:
I don't have smbus working yet, and since the VT8237R South Bridge on this board doesn't appear in sys/pci/viapm.c, I probably won't.
Some timings for buildkernel
Here is time /usr/bin/openssl speed without specifying an engine:
And here it is after (time /usr/bin/openssl speed -engine padlock):
These are similar enough that either OpenSSL is using padlock by default, or neither is properly using Padlock, which is something to troubleshoot another day