Hello all,
Quick (hopefully) question. I’m working on a device on which I’d like to run RouterOS x86. The prototype board is a Via Embedded VB7009-10E, which has two VT6130 on-board gigabit NICs (which connect into the system via PCI-e) and am running a 100megabit fiber optic card, which is based on a VT6105M PCI all-in-one bridge chip. That part has worked perfectly in my MikroNOC systems and passes traffic like a champ.
My initial test was RouterOS 5.12 on a HP T5135 thin client, which is based on the same Via processor and VX900 chipset as the VB7009 system I’m working with, and the thin client also has a VT6130 NIC chip and worked perfectly.
Since the thin client worked, it didn’t seem a big stretch that the VB7009 based on the same chipset/processor/NIC chipset would work as well. Unfortunately, that isn’t being the case.
RouterOS detects two VT6120/VT6121/VT6122 adapters (just as it detected the VT6130 in the Thin Client as a single one) and shows them both as adapters in /interfaces ethernet but will not set the interface running.
At first, I thought it was a board spin problem (these are early release boards) so I threw in the second of my four, and got the same error.
I knew the NIC worked, as I used Clonezilla to image the RouterOS onto the device, and then tested running Vyatta on it and it worked fine; both Ethernet adapters showed up and could communicate with the outside world.
The only real difference I could find was that Vyatta was based on Linux 2.6.37 and had a /lib/modules/(kernel)/kernel/drivers/net/via-velocity.ko file that was about 41k, and RouterOS is based on 2.6.35 and had a via-velocity.ko filesize of about 15k.
I even attempted to replace the RouterOS kernel with the Vyatta kernel and via-velocity.ko to no avail, though I’m not too sure how successful this was 
Has anyone else seen any errors with these types of devices? I’ll hook up both devices and get support files generated; working ThinClient and non-working, fresh-install VB7009