From owner-freebsd-amd64@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Oct 13 09:06:54 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7840C16A4B3 for ; Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:06:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from canning.wemm.org (canning.wemm.org [192.203.228.65]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E71BC43F75 for ; Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:06:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from wemm.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by canning.wemm.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D41BB2A8E3; Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:06:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) X-Mailer: exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 with nmh-1.0.4 To: Matthias Bauer In-Reply-To: <20031013142918.GA19096@faui1d.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:06:53 -0700 From: Peter Wemm Message-Id: <20031013160653.D41BB2A8E3@canning.wemm.org> cc: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Summary of experience with amd64 mainboards? X-BeenThere: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the AMD64 platform List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 16:06:54 -0000 Matthias Bauer wrote: > Hi, > since quite a variety of mainboards for the amd64 are > available now, it would be very useful if members of this > mailing list would announce on which chipsets/mainboards > they got the amd64 port to run (and what devices on the > boards are not working as yet). It would also be nice to > put the result on the project page. The ones I have personal experience with are: 940 pin: Asus SK8N: works (nForce3 chipset, no driver for onboard nVidia nic, onboard promise 378 raid+SATA) Rioworks HDAMA: works (AMD chipset, 2 cpu, onboard if_bge gigabit, in use on the freebsd.org cluster as sledge.freebsd.org and at work) 754 pin: Asus K8V: works (VIA K8T800 chipset, onboard ide not recognized without patch which has integrated SATA support, decent onboard 3com/syskonnect gigabit nic (if_sk), onboard promise 378 raid+SATA) Gigabyte K8NPro: works (nForce3, lousy tiny bios interface, realtek 8110 gigabit nic (if_re) - supposedly not bad. onboard nVidia ethernet isn't connected (but we dont have a driver anyway)). AMD Solo4, Solo5 and Solo7 (developer reference boards) I really like both of the ASUS boards for personal use and the Rioworks for servers. I have not seen any of the MSI boards so I can't vouch for them. The MSI 2xCPU board only has 2 dimm slots on one of the cpus so I'm not that interested in their server board. Their consumer board appears to have similar specs to the asus K8V but I haven't tried it. All of these boards work with ACPI, minus some quirks with ordering the serial ports. Some of them list the COM2 port first in the tables which means we assign 'sio0' to it. Thats only a minor annoyance though. The onboard nVidia ethernet is annoying because they only give out a binary driver blob that you write an OS shim to use. This works for i386, but obviously isn't going to work too well for an amd64 kernel. The only board affected by this is the Asus SK8N, but ethernet cards are not a big deal. I really really dislike the bios on the Gigabyte, and really like the ones on the ASUS boards. The Gigabyte bios interface is almost worthless and gives you very little control over anything. If it had to be named, I'd call it a 'BIOS for dummies'. On the other hand, the ASUS bios' give you more than enough rope. For example, Gigabyte have 'PNP OS: Yes' by default and dont give you the ability to turn it off. ASUS do let you turn it off. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5