BayTrail OMV (Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V)

I got a hold of the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V motherboard.
http://www.gigabyte.com/produc…uct-page.aspx?pid=4918#ov

Update 2014.10.12:
The F3 versio of the BIOS works with OMV 1.0.20 (Kernel 3.2.0 and 3.16) and can be run headless.

Not yet recomended for OMV use
This board cannot boot without a monitor connected to it. (Tested with BIOS F1 and F2).
You can make a VGA dummy plug to run the board without a monitor. Google "VGA dummy plug"

Do not use F2 BIOS for OMV!
The kernel 3.2 supplied with Debian 7.4.0 does not work with BIOS version F2. None of the USB ports work. I've tried with all kinds of different BIOS settings and kernel attributes. Newer kernels work with F2 BIOS. Also if you have made a setup with F1 BIOS and update it to F2 the EFI GRUB is trashed and your old installation will not boot.

If you are reading this after you updated the BIOS you can get the old BIOS back from the backup chip. At the moment F1 BIOS is not downloadable from Gigabyte website.
This is what i did to force activate the backup BIOS:
1. Power off the system
2. Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds then release. Board will start and shutdown.
3. Press and hold the reset button. The board tries to start up but shutsdown. I let it cycle a couple of times. One cycle might be enough.
4. Press the power button to shutdown.
5. After the computer has shutdown start it up and it should show a bluebox with information about the BIOS recory process.

Make sure you get 1.35V RAM!
The QVL for RAM at Gigabytes website is most likely incorrect. Manual says 1.35V RAM but the list has atleast one 1.5V RAM in it (Kingston KVR16S11/4)

Heatsink height is hard to tell from the pictures. I can tell you that it is lower than the top of the ethernet ports.
The motherboard has a weird UEFI shell that you can boot into. Tried it once and couldn't find any good use for it...

This machine is waiting for OMV on Debian Wheezy so inorder to test hw compatibility I installed Debian 7.4.0 with gnome desktop on to it. I added the non-free firmware packages to the installation media and installation went smoothly.

The NICs are not specified at the Gigabyte website but Debian reports them as

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06)

Using a VGA FullHD monitor and the stock Debian the resolution was too small and the computer didn't shutdown it just hanged at "System halted". It also gave errors about pulseaudio and alsa. After upgrading to the 3.12 backports kernel those problems went away.

Power consumtion with the following components:
- 3.12 or 3.13 kernel
- Antec ISK110 case
- one 4GB RAM
- Intel 520 SSD
When the computer is turned off it takes under 2W from the wall socket.
Idle power consumpition at desktop is under 14W from the wall socket.

As I will use USB3 for the storage HDD(s) i tested the read speed by copying an iso file. Read speed was over 100MB/s with my 2TB WD My Passport Ultra. So there shouldn't be any hw problems related to USB3 either.

Power consumption while copying from USB3 HDD to SSD ~23W.
Idle with USB3 HDD still spinning ~17W.

I got the board from a Finnish retailer. They have a couple still left in stock. http://www.jimms.fi/tuote/GA-J1900N-D3V
I payed a high price of 95€ for the board.

I'll definately install Kralizec and Virtualbox plugin as virtualization is why I will eventually update from my Atom330 machine. It will be interesting to see how it will handle virtualization. The J1900 CPU should be over three times more powerful than the Atom330.

Hope they get virtulbox download links working soon so I can test.
In the meantime I added a pic to the first post before someone requests it.

I was having random issues with this board and discovered that the QualifiedVendorList for RAM is most likely incorrect. Make sure to get 1.35V RAM as that is what the manual specifies.

Zitat von "davidh2k"

Same goes for all Intel NUCs, Both BayTrail and Haswell(s).

Greetings
David

Actually I found a baytrail board that can handle normal voltage ram. http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900B-ITX/

Also updated the first post with some major drawbacks of this board. F1/ F2 BIOS
- No booting without a monitor
- F2 BIOS does not work with Debian 7.4.0 (Kernel 3.2.X) None of the USB ports works.

Anyone know is there a easy way to modify the installation media kernel so that backports kernel is used straight away? All the instructions I found seemed quite difficult.

I got it working again by forcing the activation of the backup BIOS and by making a VGA dummy plug to make it start without a monitor.

I don't know why Gigabyte does not offer the original BIOS on their website but I think they absolutely should especially when there are no official instructions for the dualBIOS recovery.

The F3 versio of the BIOS works with OMV 1.0.20 (Kernel 3.2.0 and 3.16) and can be run headless.