How about some Bay Trail?

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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Saw this over at SilentPCReview. Doesn't appear on any US listings from Supermicro yet, but sure looks interesting for an extremely low power HTPC/XBMC/Myth Front End.

Could even do for a decent low-end file server using all 6 SATA for spinny disks and boot from mSATA or even USB.

MB Supermicro Celeron X10SBA-O - rombus-Online

Celeron J1850 BayTrail (10w TDP, 2.0Ghz Quad Core)
8GB via 2 SODIMM
Displayport, HDMI & VGA
6 SATA (4 SATA 3)
mSATA
Dual Gbe
On-board USB Type A

Selling on British sites just under ~170GBP ex VAT, which should translate to about $275.
 
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PigLover

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Got the X10SBA. Bought it through SuperBiiz.com at for $173us

Been playing with it for a few hours. A few notes:

  • Board does support 2x8GB SODIMMS for 16GB total. Product page and manual both say 2x4GB, 8GB max (although amusingly their QVL lists 4GB & 8GB compatible DIMMS)
  • This is the first MB I've worked with in a long time that didn't have IPMI...I forgot what a PITA it is to physically connect KB/Mouse/Monitor and to copy images onto a USB before loading. I love remote management!
  • I haven't been able to get any version of Linux to load. None. Just beeps and restarts as soon as boot process starts. Tried CentOS (6.3 & 6.5), Fedora, Ubuntu. Won't even load the "lightweight" kernels used by Memtest86+ or the UBCD distro. No luck with Linux. Stinks - cuz the whole reason I bought this board was to run XBMC on Ubuntu.

    [*}Really irritated at the no Linux. It's wierd - been years since I found a MB that wouldn't load UBCD or Memtest86+. They are just about as generic as can be.
  • Windows, however, loads easy every time. Very smooth installs. With a 120GB mSATA drive I installed Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. All of them loaded nice and easy. Windows recognized all devices out of the box except the SM Bus Controller and a "PCI Encryption/Decryption Controller". There is a windows LAN driver on SMs website for this board but I'm going to have to search for the others.
  • Powered the board with a PicoPSU and measured power with Kill-A-Watt. Measured 4w "off". 16w was max observed draw during powerup/bootup. 14w stable in BIOS. 12w idle (with video on) in Windows 8.1, same 12w with video off. Running Prime95 stress test hit 19w max.
  • Running completely passive - MB just sitting open on my desk. Running Prime95 stress test hit 55C. Seems safe for passive (thought might be different when in a case).
Overall I'm fairly impressed with it. Reasonably snappy in 8.1 for a low power CPU. WAY better than last generation Atoms. I am disappointed about not being able to get any Linux distro to boot. I could do XBMC on Windows if I have to - but the other three media players are all running Linux and I'd rather not have a one-off. Open to any suggestions to try for loading Linux on this board.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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On further review...not all the drivers loaded at all. MS Default drivers only for video and PCIe. Looks like the INFs for the J1000 SoC have not been released by Intel.

Sometimes getting products first isn't a win...

Left a trouble ticket with SM to see if they can offer any suggestions, beta drivers or at least an outlook on release dates for drivers.
 

TangoWhiskey9

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Jun 28, 2013
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Being fair to PigLover - I would expect more issues with the T100 than the X10SBA. At least the X10 has decent NICs
 

PigLover

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Found the X10SBA Windows drivers - at least alpha versions of them - on SMs FTP site. Dissapointed that they didn't even bother to respond on the ticket I opened. Got the pointer to the FTP site from somebody else.

Chipset here: ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/Intel_INF/Bay_Trail_Series_Chipset/
Video here: ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/VGA/Intel/Core/v15.33.5.3349/
LAN drivers are published normally on their website.

Everything loaded OK. Chipset driver left one item unrecognized (Intel(R) Atom(TM) Trusted Execution Engine Interface - 0F18). But otherwise all looks right.

Power management didn't change at all. Still goes down to 12 watts idle/video blanked. Peaks around 19 watts running prime95.

Disappointed in video performance. Loaded windows version of XBMC. Can't play a DVD worth a crap. Blu-Ray is definite no-go. Still messing around with it...

More: with VLC Player DVD images play fine. Must be a problem with XBMC.
 
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rubylaser

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Jan 4, 2013
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Is XBMC trying to use hardware acceleration to decode the video instead of using the CPU? Try to disable hardware decoding, and see if it improves. Perhaps VAAPI doesn't properly support the onboard GPU.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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That would be my guess. Software not caught up to hardware features.
 

Cheddoleum

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Feb 19, 2014
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Got the X10SBA. Bought it through SuperBiiz.com at for $173us

Been playing with it for a few hours. A few notes:

[snip!]

I am disappointed about not being able to get any Linux distro to boot. I could do XBMC on Windows if I have to - but the other three media players are all running Linux and I'd rather not have a one-off. Open to any suggestions to try for loading Linux on this board.
I'm in the same boat. I got all excited after some very cursory research on Linux support for the NIC and chipset support and went for it. Only to find that booting is a bit of a problem. It supports legacy bios boot so I can get to the install menu in 32 or 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS. But continue beyond that point and you get a Kernel panic if you're running 64-bit -- if this is a 32 bit UEFI problem it's possible that this could be corrected by inserting the "noefi" kernel parameter; which would be easier in something like Arch linux or Gentoo. With 32-bit it cranks for a bit, the screen goes blank and nothing happens after a while.

There's some enthusiasm out there to get a fix for this problem, as there are a number of new boards in this situation out there now. After spending half a day on this I'm putting it aside for a while and will come back to it in a few weeks. This is for a general purpose home server and I'm only interested in running Linux or BSD on it. This is a pretty nice board and I'd like to get it working, but if someone wants one for Windows let me know as I'm not married to using this one particularly.
 

PigLover

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While not perfect, for most server roles there is a relatively elegant solution: Hyper-v server with Linux guests. Using hyper-v disk pass through even makes NAS guests reasonable.

X10SBA seems to be quite happy running Hyper-v
 

Cheddoleum

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Feb 19, 2014
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X10SBA seems to be quite happy running Hyper-v
Good to know, thanks. I've since had more progress installing Ubuntu Server 13.10 i386 (i.e. 32 bit): I figured there's no way that's going to try to run 64-bit EFI code. So now I get the installation menu, and if I select Install, it runs, and I get the ubuntu-branded progress screen (the basic VGA graphic one with the animated dots) for a while. But after a minute or so it bails to a busybox terminal screen with the message "(initramfs) unable to find a medium containing a live file system."

From googling around there are a lot of things that can cause this, it usually has to do with bios settings.

It's kind of tricky even to get it to this point: messing around with selecting the boot priority to prefer the legacy vs. UEFI boot seems to help, but only one of my USB sticks works, even though I'm using only proven-bootable ones. And it doesn't even detect that one reliably... it seems to prefer the rear USB3 port to the front-panel, header-connected USB2 ports. Still, it does show that it can be made to run a linux installer.

(Edit -- I think that initramfs error is a red herring -- that USB disk has some left over EFI boot info on it, probably a result of using unetbootin to create it. Next time I try this I'll just use a plain .iso copied with dd.)
 
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Cheddoleum

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Feb 19, 2014
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Success. Linux on the X10SBA

Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop now installed and running on the X10SBA. It really is essentially as simple as making 32bit efi available at boot time. Basically I just followed these instructions:

[FAQ] Asus T100: Installing custom OS (android/ubuntu/*nix/Windows 7/Windows 8 x64) - xda-developers

This allowed me to boot into the live CD desktop without any issues whatsoever, and install from there. The only thing I have to add to it is that after the installation is complete and before rebooting, copy bootia32.efi onto the target disk's /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ directory. That's it. It reboots into your new drive. You may have to fiddle the the boot priorities in setup or play with the BBS boot menu (press F11 at startup) to get it to find the drive, depending on what you've done before.

Video is fine for GUI purposes, I have no idea yet about the quality of the drivers for video playback purposes but I'll play with it. Not really my concern as this is meant to be a utility closet server.

The NIC is supported by default, as is the Marvell SATA controller... though at the moment I'm just running on an old 2.5" laptop drive for testing so I can't tell you about performance yet. Let me know if I can advise on further details but it's pretty straightforward.

I'm pretty excited about this! (Particularly since I just noticed a swollen capacitor on the old Via SN board this is meant to replace, so I'm going to need something soon.)
 

Cheddoleum

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Feb 19, 2014
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In fairness, there's a lot to wade through at that link. Here are some simplified instructions for how to install Ubuntu on the X10SBA:

  1. Build a USB boot disk for an EFI 64-bit Ubuntu ISO. I chose 13.04 AMD64 Desktop as a known quantity, but I suspect later editions will do fine. Also per the above link, I used Rufus on a windows system to build it, with these settings: GPT for UEFI, FAT, 64kb.
  2. Obtain the file bootia32.efi from the zip file in this comment. Copy it to /EFI/BOOT/ on the USB drive.
  3. Use this USB drive to boot the X10SBA by selecting it from the BBS menu (F11 at boot) or setting up USB key as the first boot priority in Setup. It's UEFI, not legacy boot. I used the VGA adapter, I haven't tested the HDMI or DP output.
  4. Select "Try out Ubuntu" rather than install. Screen will be blank for a bit, then it'll go into the standard Ubuntu graphical startup. Eventually you'll get the Unity desktop. (You'll note that the default graphics support is crude and can't handle transitions.)
  5. Use the first icon at the top left to open a search window, type "terminal" and hit enter to get a terminal. Drag that out of the way if necessary so you can get to the install icon.
  6. Install as you normally would, BUT before rebooting, use the terminal and copy the bootia32.efi file from your thumb drive (poke around a bit to see where it's mounted) to /target/boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ This directory won't show up until near the end of the install process, so wait for it to prompt you to reboot.
  7. Click Reboot when it asks. Pull the USB drive as it restarts and that's it. If your new drive is anywhere in the boot priority, it should boot right into your new Ubuntu installation.
All basic credit for working this out and for making the 32bit efi binary conveniently available goes to paperWastage at xda-developers.com; I had to do very little indeed to adapt it to this.
 
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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Thank you for the summary. I'll give this a try sometime next week (got a busy weekend) and then try to get XBMC loaded on top of it.
 

ant

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Jul 16, 2013
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Is this bios from the supermicro X10SBA page new?:

BIOS File Name: X10SBA3_C31.zip
Size (KB): 3,594
BIOS Revision: R 1.0b

From the supermicro faq:
FAQ ID
18072

Date Posted 02/14/14

Question
We have a X10SBA board. During initial linux installation it is not started - periodicaly restart when trying to run distribution. We have tested with 2 validated linux based operating systems.

Answer
Please use bios version after 1.0b, which will fix this issue.




Would be interested to hear if this bios fixes the linux install issue.