UP Squared 7100 Review – Part 2: An Intel N100 fanless SBC preloaded with Ubuntu Pro 24.04

I’ve already checked out the hardware of the UP Squared 7100 fanless SBC in the first part of the review with an unboxing and first boot to Ubuntu Pro 24.04. I’ve now had time to test the features of the Intel N100 SBC with Ubuntu Pro, so I’ll report my experience with the system in this second part of the review.

I’ll report my experience with Ubuntu Pro features, test hardware features of the board including GPIOs, check out BIOS options, run a few benchmarks, and measurement power consumption.

Ubuntu Pro 24.04 System info

Let’s check system information with inxi:

There’s nothing specific to Ubuntu Pro 24.04 there, but we can confirm we have an Intel Processor N100 system with 8GB RAM, a 64GB eMMC flash, and two Gigabit Ethernet (RTL8111) ports.

Ubuntu Pro status and configuration

I had already installed Ubuntu Pro on my laptop when it was made free (for up to 5 clients) in 2022.  At the time, I noted some of the key differences between Ubuntu Pro and Ubuntu LTS as shown in the table below.

	Ubuntu LTS	Ubuntu Pro
Security patching - 2,300+ packages in Ubuntu Main repository	5 years	10 years
Security patching - 23,000+ packages in Ubuntu Universe repository	Best effort	10 years
NIST-certified FIPS crypto-modules	No	Yes
USG hardening with CIS and DISA-STIG profiles	No	Yes
Common Criteria EAL2	No	Yes
Kernel Livepatch	No	Yes
Systems management at scale with Landscape	No	Yes
Optional support	No	Yes

When I had to configure Ubuntu Pro on my laptop, I had to register and type a few commands, but the UP Squared 7100 SBC has Ubuntu Pro enabled by default.

esm-apps and esm-infra are enabled by default, but livepatch and landscape are currently disabled.

This uses AAEON account instead of a token like in the free version. We can check the security status with the following command:

I can find more information about the package with the following command:

I have livepatch enabled on my laptop, so I assumed it would be a breeze to enable on the UP Squared 7100 SBC:

But it did not quite work as expected. I tried again in the Software & Updates menu, but I got the same results.

I also tried to enable Ubuntu Security Guide:

But it did not work. That one is a known issue with Ubuntu 24.04. So we’ll give it a pass.

At that point, I contacted AAEON to find out how I could enable Livepatch and how I could use Landscape for remote management. I waited for one month for an answer, but nothing came out. I’m obviously privy to the conversation between AAEON and Canonical, but I have the feeling AAEON tried its best, and Canonical mostly ignored their request. From my point of view, this does not look good for Canonical, as a corporate client (AAEON) did not manage to get answers from (IMHO) rather basic questions. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon.

A quick look at the BIOS

When I reviewed the UP 7100 SBC in December 2023, I was really impressed by its extensive BIOS options. The UP Squared 7100 looks to be no different. You’ll be asked for password, but you can just press Enter to access the BIOS in “user” mode.

Going to the Advanced menu, we’ll find an AAEON Features section.

The Power Management menu allows the user to select the Power Mode (ATX or AT), whether to Restore AC after a Power Loss, Wake on RTC behavior and schedule configuration.

The HAT Pins Configurations menu allows the user to enable/disable I2C, SPI, UART, I2C, and ADC, select whether the LEDs should be ON or OFF at boot time, and define the default behavior of each pin at boot time.

I’ve just told you that a password was not needed to enter the BIOS. However, if you use the password “upassw0rd”, you’ll access the BIOS in administrator mode.

AAEON says the CRB Setup is for testing ONLY! But it’s where you can access a wide range of options that may be useful if you are familiar with the internals of Intel processors.

Most people won’t need to use this.

UP Squared 7100 features testing on Ubuntu Pro 24.04

I’ve also checked all/most ports and features of the UP Squared 7100 SBC as follows:

• HDMI – Video OK, Audio OK
• DisplayPort – Video OK, No Audio (see screenshots below)
• Storage – eMMC flash and M.2 socket with NVMe SSD detected (See benchmarks below for storage performance)
• Gigabit Ethernet
  • Top port (close to heatsink) – OK (iperf3 DL: 942 Mbps, UL: 943 Mbps, full-duplex: 938/918 Mbps)
  • Bottom port – OK (iperf3 DL: 941 Mbps, UL: 943 Mbps, full-duplex: 938/917 Mbps)
• USB ports tested with an ORICO NVMe SSD enclosure (EXT-4 partition) and an RF dongle for a wireless mouse and keyboard
  • Front USB 3.0 port – 10 Gbps; tested up to 993 MB/s with iozone3
  • Rear
    • USB 3.0 top – 10 Gbps; tested up to 987 MB/s with iozone3
    • USB 3.0 bottom – 10 Gbps; tested up to 989 MB/s with iozone3
• RTC – OK
  
  jaufranc@up2-7100-cnx:~$ sudo apt install util-linux-extra jaufranc@up2-7100-cnx:~$ timedatectl Local time: Sat 2025-02-08 15:04:09 +07 Universal time: Sat 2025-02-08 08:04:09 UTC RTC time: Sat 2025-02-08 08:04:09 Time zone: Asia/Bangkok (+07, +0700) System clock synchronized: yes NTP service: active RTC in local TZ: no jaufranc@up2-7100-cnx:~$ sudo hwclock -r 2025-02-08 15:04:21.293825+07:00

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

  jaufranc@up2-7100-cnx:~$ sudo apt install util-linux-extra jaufranc@up2-7100-cnx:~$ timedatectl                Local time: Sat 2025-02-08 15:04:09 +07            Universal time: Sat 2025-02-08 08:04:09 UTC                  RTC time: Sat 2025-02-08 08:04:09                 Time zone: Asia/Bangkok (+07, +0700) System clock synchronized: yes               NTP service: active           RTC in local TZ: no jaufranc@up2-7100-cnx:~$ sudo hwclock -r 2025-02-08 15:04:21.293825+07:00

• I/Os – See section below.

Besides the HDMI port, the UP Squared 7100 also has an audio wafer, and I could not test that part, but additional audio output interfaces (Speakers and SPDIF output) are shown in Ubuntu settings.

DisplayPort is shown with the HDMI option, but there’s no specific option for DisplayPort Audio. I’m also not sure whether the board is at fault, or it might be the cable or even monitor, since it’s the first time I’ve used DisplayPort with this setup.

I tested dual 4K video output with HDMI and DisplayPort successfully using two KTC A32Q8 4K monitors.

UP Squared 7100 GPIO testing

The wiki has instructions to control GPIOs. It’s very similar to my experience using GPIO pins with the UP 7000 SBC, so I’ll go quickly, except for parts that didn’t work for now last time around.

The layout of the 40-pin GPIO is the same for all UP Squared boards, although some pins on the Pro models have additional functions.

We can find the two GPIO chips in /dev/:

We can list all GPIOs with gpioinfo:

I did a quick test with the three user LEDs on top of the Ethernet port:

This will turn on the three LEDs. We can turn them off with echo 0 instead, for example:

Interrupt can be tested with the the following test program

I used GPIO3 (pin 3) for testing:

A falling edge was detected after connecting pin 3 (GPIO2) and pin 6 (GND) with a jumper cable.

I installed the BootTerm utility to quickly list the UART interfaces:

I was expecting the driver to be “dw-apb-uart”, but it just shows as “port”. We can check the UART interfaces in sysfs too, and there’s no association with tty devices:

But the UART devices are there (one on the GPIO header, and the other on the header):

I haven’t found a way to resolve that one yet.

We can check I2C with i2c-tools:

We can list the SPI device in sysfs:

and also used the spi-config to confirm they are detected and can be configured:

Last time around, I had an issue with PWM using the UP 7000 SBC. AAEON eventually provided the pwmset.sh script so I tried it again with the UP Squared 7100. Usage:

Two PWM chips are listed in sysfs:

When I first tried it returned a write error:

The original code used pwnchip0, so I changed the code to use pwmchip1 instead, and this time there was no error:

I dusted my Ikascope pen oscilloscope to check the waveform on my Android smartphone, and it does indeed work

Changing the duty cycle to 20% output does indeed work too.

The ADC input device can be found in sysfs:

We can list the raw voltage with the following command:

AAEON UP Squared 7100 Benchmarks in Ubuntu Pro 24.04

The performance of the Intel Processor N100 is well known, but I’ll still run a few benchmarks on the UP Squared 7100 SBC to find out if there’s anything unusual.

sbc-bench.sh won’t run because the board is “Too busy for benchmarking”.

That’s because there’s one process in D “uninterruptible sleep” state:

So I modified the script to skip the load average test, and tried again:

Something is seriously wrong, as a 7-zip score is well below the typical 13,xxx score for an Intel N100 mini PC, and even slower than a Raspberry Pi 5. There’s no thermal throttling with the CPU temperature reaching only up to 76.0°C.

Let’s check the power limits:

PL1 is set to 6W and PL2 to 25W. But for reference, PL1 is set to 15W and PL2 to 25W in the GEEKOM Mini Air12 mini PC. I suspeect that may be because the UP Squared 7100 SBC is design to run properly with an ambient temperature of up to 60°C.

We can enter the BIOS to confirm that, and change PL1 to 15000 mW.

After the change, PL1 is indeed set to 15W, and PL2 remains at 25W:

Let’s run sbc-bench.sh again with the updated power limits:

The 7-zip score is now 13,220 points or about as expected for a fanless Intel N100 SBC. As previously mentioned, the lower default PL1 power limit is not necessarily a misconfiguration since the UP Squared 7100 is supposed to work in a 0°C ~ 60°C temperature range, and it may make sense to set PL1 to 6W for hotter environments. The ambient temperature (about 28°C) during our test is relatively warm for a consumer device, but it may be considered a cool room for industrial applications…

Storage benchmarks

I tested the performance of the eMMC flash with iozone:

Around 311 MB/s and 230 MB/s sequential read and write speeds are similar to the results with the flash used on the UP 7100 SBC, and pretty good for an eMMC flash. Random I/O results look good too. and better than on the UP 4000.

Let’s now run the same tested on the MAKERDISK NVMe SSD mostly to test the PCIe interface:

At 1500 MB/s, the results are consistent with PCIe Gen3 x2 from the specs of the SBC. The SSD itself is rated 2050 MB/s (Read) and 1,000 MB/s (Write), so that’s normal, except for the write speed that’s higher than expected/possible.  I used an ext4 partition, so there should not be any issues with caching, and I’m not sure what happened here.

3D Graphics Benchmark

I went with the usual Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 to test 3D graphics performance in Linux.

The UP Squared 7100 board could render the benchmark scene at 11.3 FPS on average with a score of 284 points at the standard 1920×1080 resolution (and PL1 set to 15W). The score is a little lower than actively cooled mini PC, but closer to the 294 points achieved by the MINIX NEO Z100-0dB fanless mini PC.

Video Playback in YouTube

I could play YouTube videos in Firefox and Chrome at 1920×1080 60 FPS with just a couple of frames dropped at the beginning. Switching to 4K 60 FPS in Chrome was more challenging by the board could still cope.

However, at 8K 60 FPS the video was unwatchable due to constant loading and a large number of frames dropped.

Power Consumption

Finally, I measured power consumption with a wall meter:

• Power off – 2.1 – 2.2 Watts
• Idle – 8.4 – 8.6 Watts
• Full HD 60 fps YouTube video in Firefox – 13.6 to 14.4 Watts (AVC codec)
• Full HD 60 fps YouTube video in Chrome – 15.3 to 19.3 Watts (AV1 codec)
• 4K 60 fps YouTube video in Chrome – 21.9 to 25.1 Watts
• Stress test with “stress -c 4” – 21.9 to 22.1 Watts

Note: An HDMI monitor, one RF dongle for a wireless keyboard and mouse, and an Ethernet cable were connected to the board during measurements. It looks like the power supply provided with the board might not be the most efficient… Power consumption is quite higher than that of the Processor N100-based UP 700 SBC I tested in 2023.

Conclusion

The UP Squared 7100 Intel N100-powered SBC works well in Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS with most features working as expected, and some improvements over the UP 7000 SBC like support for dual 4K video output using HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs. 4Kp60 YouTube video playback was also relatively smooth, an improvement over the UP 7000 SBC.

It’s better than most other x86 SBC when it comes to GPIO with a BIOS that can define the behavior of each pin, and there’s also a CRB Setup menu in the BIOS in administrator mode with an impressive number of options.  A few things that did not work for me were DisplayPort audio output, and the UART interfaces were not mapped to /dev/tty devices. Apart from that, everything works as expected after I changed PL1 from 6W to 15W, as otherwise, the performance was quite lower than on other Intel N100 systems. I suspect it was done on purpose since the board needs to operate in the 0 to 60°C temperature range.

Another highlight of the UP Squared 7100 SBC is that it can ship with Ubuntu Pro, instead of just Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, so if your organization needs Ubuntu Pro, it’s just plug-and-play and there’s no need to manually configure each board. I could get updates through Ubuntu Pro just fine, but I was unable to enable Livepatch, and it was unclear to me how to use Landscape for remote management. AAEON asked Canonical, but we were unable to get an answer after one month. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.

I’d like to thank AAEON for sending the UP Squared 7100 SBC with an Intel N100, 8GB RAM, and a 64GB eMMC flash preloaded with Ubuntu Pro for review. The sample reviewed here can be purchased for $306.99 including the 72W power adapter ($15.99) and Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS license + installation service ($30 + $17.99). The price is $259 without those before taxes and shipping.

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