ALIX system boards are manufacturered and sold by PC Engines. They utilise the x86-based AMD Geode CPUs. The boards and other components (enclosures, power supplies, wireless cards, CompactFlash cards, etc) are sold separately, although some retailer sell pre-build kits. At the time of writing (August 2011), ALIX boards and associated accessories are readily available from many resellers across Europe and North America.

There are many models of ALIX boards (all work with OpenWRT at present), with two different CPU/RAM configurations:

All models have a CompactFlash socket and some also have a 44-pin IDE header for 2.5" IDE hard disks.

Many models have miniPCI sockets (ideal for WiFi cards), and some have miniPCI Express sockets (note that there is a warning on the PC Engines site stating that these cannot be used with WiFi cards though).

The device does not include an embedded Ethernet switch. Models with multiple Ethernet ports have multiple Ethernet controllers (Via VT6105M).

There are no pre-built images for the ALIX boards available at http://downloads.openwrt.org/. The generic x86 ones will not include the appropriate drivers (e.g. wireless, LED support, USB). Building your own image and specifying the build profile below will ensure the appropriate drivers are all included in the image.

Follow:

• OpenWrt Buildroot – About
• OpenWrt Buildroot – Installation
• OpenWrt Buildroot – Usage

Build profile should be:

• Target System: x86 [2.6]
• Target Profile: PCEngines Alix

The current release Backfire 10.03.1-RC5 openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext2.img.gz includes Ethernet drivers (at least for alix2d3). After flashing the OpenWrt image, follow these guides to install missing packages:

• opkg update
  opkg install ''kmod-leds-alix''

• wireless
• usb.essentials
• usb.storage
• LuCI

NOTE: If you have problem mounting external storage on boot apply this fix: sleep.before.startup.

The easiest method of installation for ALIX boards is to use dd to write the image to the CompactFlash card on machine.

1. Attach a USB CompactFlash reader/writer to the flashing machine and insert the CompactFlash card
2. Watch the output from 'dmesg' to see what device ID it has picked up (it will be something like /dev/sdb)
3. Ensure that /dev/sdb (or whatever is determined in step #2) is not mounted through the use of the 'mount' command. If it is, unmount it with 'umount'.
4. Decide whether you want to use the squashfs (openwrt-x86-squashfs.image) or ext2 image (openwrt-x86-ext2.image). The ext2 one will take up considerably more space on the CompactFlash card, but will be faster to boot.
5. Uncompress your image file

    gunzip openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext2.img.gz 

6. Flash the desired image to the CompactFlash card with:

   dd if=openwrt-x86-ext2.image of=/dev/sdb

7. Depending on your CF card size the default install won´t full fill your CF card. You can use gparted or equivalent application to expand the root partition.
8. Removed the CompactFlash card, place it in the ALIX board and power on.
9. Once powered on and booted up the ALIX should be reachable on 192.168.1.1 on eth1. In default install eth0 is wan interface configured to obtain ip by dhcp and eth1 is br-lan interface with static ip 192.168.1.1
10. If you have a serial cable it is recommended to do the first boot and initial network configuration with it attached ( minicom configured for 38400-8N1)

Note: If you selected the squashfs image it may take a few minutes for the device to power on.

1. Usually one just has to dd the combined image onto the CF card:

   wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1-rc5/x86_generic/openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext2.img.gz
   gunzip openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext2.img.gz
   dd if=openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext2.img of=/dev/cfcard

2. Afterwards you can use the usual utilities like fdisk, tune2fs, etc. to resize the system partition (its only around 40MiB by default) and maybe upgrade the filesystem.
3. Sometimes you need to change the root= parameter in the GRUB settings if the booting kernel does not find the root device. You'll find the menu.list within the first partition.

—-

→generic.sysupgrade

Note: The below is taken from the Old Wiki, but is known to still be correct.

Assuming you have the kmod-led-alix module present (check via lsmod), you should get three LED devices under /sys/class/leds/ - alix:1, alix:2 and alix:3 This should turn on one led:

echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/alix:1/brightness

And off:

echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/alix:1/brightness

And this should make it blink:

echo timer > /sys/class/leds/alix:1/trigger
echo 1000 > /sys/class/leds/alix:1/delay_off
echo 100 > /sys/class/leds/alix:1/delay_on

You can assign various triggers for LED activity using the instructions here.

After reading the previous link about leds functionality, the easiest way to configure the leds is from the web gui (luci) in "system" » "led configuration"

Note: The below is taken from the Old Wiki, and its current correctness is unknown.

• The button does not seem to work
• Attach serial cable, speed is 38400
• Press Esc during or after the memory check (can be tricky to time right)
• Choose 'safe mode' in the grub menu

Note: The below is taken from the Old Wiki, and its current correctness is unknown.

The Geode LX CPUs have a hardware watchdog. It might be supported by the scx200_wdt kernel module that provides the same support for the GX series.

These commands might enable the watchdog with the GX series CPUs.

mknod -m 600 /dev/wd c 10 130
modprobe scx200_wdt margin=30

An example of the watchdog in action on ALIX boards can be found at twam.info

As of OpenWRT Backfire 10.03, cryptodev support can be enabled by installing the following packages (confirmed and tested on Alix 2d13):

From Kernel Modules, Cryptographic API modules:

• kmod-crypto-core
• kmod-crypto-aes
• kmod-crypto-hw-geode
• kmod-crypto-ocf

This was tested using openssl-util, which was installed from Utilities –> openssl-util. The command to test it is:

• "openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc -engine cryptodev"

The Alix Geode crypto engine supports only AES-128. Other ciphers are not supported. For more general crypto hardware info, see here:

• cryptographic.hardware.accelerators

Many of the below are written with Gentoo in mind, but will work equally well on OpenWRT (you should install relevant pages via 'opkg' rather than 'emerge' though).

• Watchdog usage on Gentoo
• Accessing temperature sensors
• Utilising hardware AES engine