Debian on the HP Kayak XU800

This dinosaur which I dug out of a skip is actually a surprisingly good performer. If you can find enough RDRAM to make it useable by today's standard it is worth a few quid for refurbishment.

Hardware

This is one of the first Intel 840 systems and it comes LOADED - SCSI on board, AGP-pro slot, multiple PCI slots including 64 bit ones. Unfortunately, as Intel in those days intended for all of us it is a RDRAM system. The RDRAM is a huge weird add-on board which separates the PCI slots from the CPU part of the system.

moonbird:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82840 840 [Carmel] Chipset Host Bridge (Hub A) (rev 01)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82840 840 [Carmel] Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 01)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82840 840 [Carmel] Chipset PCI Bridge (Hub B) (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801AA PCI Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801AA ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801AA IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801AA USB Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801AA SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] (rev 01)
01:06.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE]
01:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX (rev 20)
02:1f.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82806AA PCI64 Hub PCI Bridge (rev 02)
03:00.0 PIC: Intel Corporation 82806AA PCI64 Hub Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (rev 01)
03:09.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7892P U160/m (rev 02)

It can be made to be extremely quiet with very little expense. A suitable fanless video adapter combined with new fans for the CPU hood (cpus themselves have no fans) and the PCI intake as well as new power supply will yield what is basically a silent system with very reasonable power consumption. Unfortunately the power supply needs to have that extra AT-like ATX-add-on header which severely limits the options in todays EATX/PCIX world. Thankfully I had a 3 year old power supply "fall out" from a dead athlon system which fit the bill.

On the negative side - the hardware assembly is quirky to say the least. Disks are mounted with their PCB upwards by default which is a position Seagate is known to dislike. If you turn the case into "desktop" mode it becomes even worse - the disks are bottom up. The front bezel also gets in the way of multi-slot disk enclosures (tried with Silverstone and it was a royal PITA to fit).

Running Linux

It runs Linux out of the box flawlessly. Surprisingly for something that old ACPI works, power management also works. It offers only S4 and S5 sleep states and it takes it a considerable amount of time to boot so hibernating it does not make a lot of sense. S3 unfortunately is unavailable. Sensors also work fairly well.

The only tweak necessary is to get the audio working on the post-2.6.18 kernels. At some point someone noticed that the old CS4323 Crystal Audio driver has a huge binary blob in it which suspiciously looks like firmware. Instead of isolating it under whatever license, the whole driver got canned. Considering that there are very few systems using this chipset nobody screamed. The driver builds cleanly vs 2.6.26 as shipped with Debian and works flawlessly.

Conclusion

If you notice one of these sticking out of a skip do not hesitate. It is worth it to try to resurrect it. It will make a nice house server and will probably tick away in a dusty corner consuming a very reasonable amount of power for years to come (as long as you have a suitable power supply for it of course).