AAEON EMB-BT1: A Linux-Friendly, Mini-ITX, Atom "Bay Trail" Board

In terms of Linux compatibility with the EMB-BT1, distributions going back to the end of 2013 like Ubuntu 13.10 are compatible with the Intel Bay Trail hardware... However, for Bay Trail, the newer the kernel and other packages the better. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS the Bay Trail support is now in good standing. The Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1 offer a decent out-of-the-box configuration for Bay Trail's HD Graphics.

The only issue experienced with the board when running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is that the Intel DRM driver seemed to incorrectly parse a Dell HDMI monitor's EDID information and ended up mode-setting to 3840 x 1280 for the 1920 x 1080 display. Aside from that, all the basic support was in place with working 3D acceleration for this first AAEON motherboard we have tested at Phoronix.

Those looking to use video acceleration with this Bay Trail motherboard on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will need to install the libva-intel-vaapi-driver package.

For getting an idea to the Atom E3825 Linux performance, I benchmarked the EMB-BT1-A10-3825 against several other low-power boards when running a near-final snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The other boards used for this comparison included:

- An Intel Core i3 4130 "Haswell" system as a low-end desktop system.

- An AMD E1-2100 dual-core 1.0GHz "Kabini" system.

- An AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" system.

All systems were running the same release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.13 kernel. Due to the chipset/motherboard differences, it was just a selection of low-end/low-power boards I had on hand and were available to install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the latest benchmarking. If you wish to benchmark your own system(s) against the results about to be shown in this article, install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1404076-KH-LINUX739129. It's that easy with our open-source and fully-automated benchmarking software.