Are these devices needed?

Operating Systems & Open Source Windows
1

I recently bought a Morefine M9 mini PC. As with all Chinese mini PCs, support is almost non existent. It’s a Intel N100 low power NUC like device, I bought it bare bone without OS.

When I install Windows 10 and manually get all chipset/gfx/network drivers from Intel, I am left with a number of unknown devices. Looking them up, I could find what they are (all Intel) but Intel only offered a driver for the HID Event Filter. All others I can only find drivers for on ‘shady’ driver aggregation sites.

From what I can google, those devices might not be really needed and I could just disable them. Like when you don’t need audio, just disable the audio device. But for these, I am unsure, as they’re pretty low level and actually might perform some function in the normal operation of the PC. I’d like to hear from experts here if these are needed for ‘normal’ PC operations:

    1) Base System Device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV467E – Intel GNA Scoring Accelerator Module driver
    2) PCI device – PCI\VEN_8086&DEV54EB - Intel Serial IO I2C Host Controller #3
    3) PCI device – PCI\VEN_8086&DEV54E8 - Intel Serial IO I2C Host Controller #0
    4) Unknown Device – ACPI\VEN_INTC&DEV1001 - Intel Trace Hub ACPI controller
    5) Unknown Device – ACPI\VEN_INTC&DEV1057 – Intel ACPI device for GPIO controller

Thanks!

2

Yeah dont get anything from there.

If your use case is pedestrian enough, you should not need drivers. If all works, you may not need much more than what Win10 already installed.

ACPI is harddrive related (SATA). The fact you already have Win10 running means you are fine.

GPIO is for controlling devices (General Purpose Input Output)

Serial is also for Com ports, probably. Also for controlling industrial devices (the primary usecase for these NUC-like devices).

No idea about the GNA…

3

at the bottom of the page there was a link to this… m9 support package.

it should have everything you need.

4

Thanks for responding! Yeah, I never want to get stuff from those sites, malware is the norm there.

The Serial IO stuff used to have an Intel driver - SErialIO-Win10-Win11-30.100.2229.4 but from a post on their forums, it seems they withdrew it early 2023. New version no longer support the mentioned variants, so any old driver I would find on those sites would also at the very least have a serious issue. But Intel’s lack of information and support is very disappointing. For such a large organization with a rich history, you’d expect better.

GPIO I don’t use, as in I only use the built in ports - USB, audio jack, hdmi. Internal M.2 Sata and M.2 PCI. There are no other connection options. So if those are not tied into GPIO and Serial IO I guess I can already strike those from the list.

Leaves the GNA and Trace Hub stuff. The trace hub seems to be a logging driver - the tools Intel delivers for it are for reading those logs. So if no other driver or app complains about it not being there, I can ignore this one too?

5

I take it you don’t get Chinese stuff. Their support is dubious just like the driver sites I mentioned.

I already looked through their zip archive which contains a load of drivers they run via a powershell script - they don’t use the official installers. My guess is this is what they run on their PCs when they deliver them with ram, ssd and installed OS.

And the drivers there were incomplete as well. Still missing the Serial IO drivers.

So my policy is to always get drivers from the manufacturer, not from the dealer. I.e. I also don’t get drivers from Asus website, I just hunt down Realtek, AMD, Intel, ASmedia etc from the source. Much more reliable and secure when you have to deal with the Chinese.

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6

no mate i learned my lesson with chinese products via powercolor… :frowning:

i guess its time to break out a hardware monitor, gather a list of the chipsets and download the relivant files from the chipset manufacturer.
bit of a pain in the ass but at least they will all be clean and legit. :slight_smile:

7

Did that already (mentioned in first post). It’s all Intel stuff, but unfortunately, can’t find those drivers on the Intel site. I assume these are low level drivers that only the manufacturers can get from Intel, as some of them are in the Morefine archive. Others Intel withdrew for some reason and new versions no longer support the devices I have (different PCI dev ids).

I’ll just continue with the installation and hope nothing gets borked to the point I can’t fix it with a later install of those iffy drivers from Morefine… For now: disabled all those devices.

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8

I struggled for a long time with these unknown devices for M9 N100. I don’t like disabling such devices as I don’t know it may end up with a stability issue.

Finally, I’ve just found on dell website a driver for N100 processor
Intel-Serial-IO-Driver-for-N100-N305-Intel-Processors_2T4TD_WIN64_30.100.2229.4_A00_01.EXE (lookup dell n100 intel), which includes drivers for 54E8, 54EB devices.

1 Like