Hi guys!

Do you know any OpenWRT compatible device having mini pci express slot?

Thanks a lot!!!! :-)
Nikos!

Alix 6b2
http://pcengines.ch/alix6b2.htm

The WL-500gP (v1 only) has a mini-PCI slot, but using it would mean removing the wifi card.

The topic is about mini pci ***EXPRESS***

I need a small size board to connect GTM 382
http://www.option.com/en/products/produ … out/#start

I have to check if the module can work with Alix 6b2, as the board supports only the usb mode! :-|

Thanks fot the info... :-)

I also have a real interest in this topic. First, note that miniPCI-e is a superset of the electrical standard for PCI-e 1x used on desktop computers. It is fully electrically compatible for the PCI-e 1x lane signaling path, but the power available to the card is a bit lower in the miniPCI-e rendition, AND miniPCI-e adds USB and LED pins.

You will find a number of systems (the PC Engines system included) where they have soldered on a miniPCI-e slot, but only provide USB pins (and sometimes LED) - no PCI-e 1x lane. This is because many of the miniPCI-e SSDs out there are just USB thumb drives re-packaged into a miniPCI-e form factor. (Since the chipsets are already widely available and very cheap, this is an obviously easy solution for suppliers.)

USB is an easy option for vendors to include because virtually every platform contains USB, often quite a few USB buses. USB chipsets are cheap, easily added, or even if there's a limited number, an onboard hub chipset could be included to provide many ports from a single bus.

PCI-e, on the other hand, is harder to pull off. Your platform's northbridge or southbridge generally must include support for PCI-e. As a result, you will only find PCI-Express on newer VIA and Intel platforms. AMD (ATI) and nVidia also have chipsets with PCI-e, but you will not see these in the embedded / low power space nearly as much as Intel and VIA.

The signaling rate involved with PCI-e is much higher, so all the tolerances on the PCB, soldering, etc. are tighter than with USB, so there's a hair more expense and effort required there. This combined with the "newness" of PCI-e means that many platforms which have northbridges or southbridges with PCI-e don't even have any PCI-e leads or connectors available.

The challenge you will face is that most miniPCI-e cards for wireless (802.11a/b/g/n type cards at least) use the PCI-e 1x lane, not the USB. Thus nearly any 802.11a/b/g/n type cards you find will not work unless you have a REAL miniPCI-e slot with the PCI-e lane in place. The USB and LEDs don't usually even matter.

Moreover, all the major vendors are now moving to single-chip radio designs integrating PCI-e with the radio, so we will soon

I believe that PCI-e/miniPCI-e is a great protocol. It is pretty robust and has fewer pins than PCI, a 1x PCI-e lane is much faster than even gigabit ethernet, a single 1x PCI-e lane is about twice as fast as PCI, it is a dedicated serial link rather than a bus (avoiding bandwidth contention), and it avoids the CPU overhead issues involved with USB. This makes it much more suitable than USB for demanding applications, and certainly a nice upgrade over PCI.

In the future, we will see a lot more things go miniPCI-e. All the major radio chipset vendors are starting to ship wireless radios which are single-chip solutions with onboard PCI-e. The sheer volume of notebooks and netbooks demanding them (in part due to their smaller form factor) means that soon, they will dominate the market, and costs will drop even more. Already, some vendors have made their 'best' chipsets exclusively PCI-e native.

At this time, I do not know of any available Geode LX or ARM platforms with PCI-e. AMD(ATI) and nVidia platforms also support PCI-e, but you just won't find many of those in the embedded space, especially with the mini form factor connector.

I would encourage you to look at VIA and Intel Atom platforms if you want a small embedded board with PCI-e. If space is not an object, PCI-e to miniPCI-e adaptors exist. If you look far and wide, you can find several VIA and Atom boards with miniPCI-e connectors directly onboard. I think Jetway and a few other vendors produce such things.

Another option to consider is netbooks and notebooks. Even very early generation models of netbooks began include miniPCI-e, as it was significantly smaller than miniPCI and the cost was not too much of an increase. All the way back to the EEE Surf models with Celerons running at 571 MHz included one or two miniPCI-e slots, and at this point, those whole netbooks are pretty cheap, and motherboards only are even cheaper still.

Of note, PCI to PCI-e bridges do exist. I do not know of any inexpensive solutions on the market to bridge these, but I have seen several vendors selling PCI to miniPCI-e adaptors using these bridge chips. I have no idea how the drivers work out in this situation - I'm unsure if the system is presented with a logical PCI-e bus, or if there's a bunch of drivers, patches, etc. involved.

Of course... all this discussion is a moot point if that Option card only uses the USB. But if that is the case, I would seriously look around and see about other vendors who ship a real PCI-e version of a similar thing. It will likely tax the host CPU less and yield better performance and lower power consumption.

If you do want to use a USB-only miniPCI-e card, it is simply a matter of wiring in the USB pins. Some adapters do exist on the market which do just this, and thus you could use any USB-equipped board to run your "miniPCI-e card." However, I'd also seriously look and see if that vendor also makes a USB connector version of the device... chances are that they do, and chances are it costs less and would be less of a hassle to deal with.

Hope this helps. I'd also be interested in any thoughts anybody has on miniPCI-e board options...

Thanks for the info!

Really useful!!!

Finally I used GTM382 + Alix6b2 + Ubuntu server 8.10, and works fine!!!! :-)

BR,
Nikos