Debian support for QNAP TS-119 and TS-219 Turbo NAS coming

<p>

<img src="http://www.cyrius.com/images/ts219-ts209.jpg"
 alt="TS-219 on top of TS-209" class="right" width="200" height="150" />

I received a sample of QNAP's new TS-219 Turbo NAS today.  The TS-119 and
TS-219 devices are an upgrade to QNAP's TS-109 and TS-209 devices and were
announced earlier this month at CeBIT.  The new TS-219 uses the same robust
case as the TS-209 but offers much more performance:

</p>

<ul>

<li>Marvell Kirkwood 6281 at 1.2 GHz (instead of Orion 5182 at 500 MHz)</li>
<li>512 MB RAM (instead of 128 or 256 MB)</li>
<li>16 MB flash (instead of 8 MB)</li>

</ul>

<p>

The numbers I've seen about the Kirkwood CPU suggest that the TS-219 will
indeed give a very significant performance boost.  So far, the TS-219 looks
very nice.  My only complaint is that QNAP didn't export the second
Ethernet port the Kirkwood chip offers, but I suspect this is because they
wanted to stay as close to the original design of the TS-209 as possible.

</p>

<p>

In any case, the TS-219 is a nice machine and I look forward to porting
Debian to it.  As a first step, this means getting the mainline kernel to
run on the device and adding a kernel for Kirkwood to the archive (the
latter is needed for a number of other devices based on Kirkwood anyway).
Hopefully, the remaining porting work and integration into the Debian
installer should be fairly straightforward given that the TS-209 is already
supported in Debian.  I'm sure I'll find out as I dig into the details...

</p>

<p>

I'll give periodic updates of my progress.  In the meantime, I've created
an <a href =
"http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/gallery/">image
gallery</a> of the TS-219.

</p>

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