Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 01:46:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Dan Strick <strick@covad.net> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: dan@ice.nodomain Subject: FreeBSD STABLE support for new motherboards Message-ID: <200308210846.h7L8kkMo000644@ice.nodomain>
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During the last two weeks there has been some discussion in freebsd-questions and freebsd-stable about the prospects of FreeBSD support for some motherboard devices associated with the Intel 865PE/875P and ICH5/ICH5R support chips now showing up in recent motherboard designs. The 865PE/875P chips are called MCH (memory controller hub) or "northbridge" chips. The ICH5/ICH5R chips are called ICH (i/o controller hub) or "southbridge" chips. The 865PE/875P chips are used on most new motherboards that support the new "hyperthreaded" P4 cpus with "800 MHz" front side busses. The 865PE is an 875P with some features disabled. The ICH5R is an ICH5 with some limited raid support for its serial ATA ports (allegedly only Windows XP has a driver for this feature). I recently ordered a Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard, which is perhaps characteristic of this new motherboard genre, and was concerned about the following motherboard devices: 2 parallel ATA ports - ICH5R 2 parallel ATA ports - ITE 8212 raid chip attached to ICH5R 2 serial ATA ports - ICH5R 2 serial ATA ports - Sil3112 raid chip attached to ICH5R 8 USB 2.0 ports - ICH5R 3 firewire ports - TI TSB43AB23 chip attached to ICH5R gigabit ethernet - Intel 82547EI chip attached to 875P audio - Realtek ALC655 CODEC attached to ICH5R Note: the Intel 82547EI chip is rather common on 875P motherboards because it is one of the very few ethernet controllers that can attach directly to the 875P chip. The two raid chips and the audio chip may be less common. The HARDWARE.TXT files in the FreeBSD 4.8 and 5.1 releases claimed no support for the raid and audio chips and support for only older versions of the other chips. It seemed likely that the first two parallel ATA ports would be supported in a "legacy" (generic ISA) mode, but support for the other devices looked rather uncertain. I just got my new motherboard and enough other hardware together to boot FreeBSD installation media and see what the bootstrap device configuration monologue said (but not enough other supporting hardware to actually install and run FreeBSD). When my motherboard boots, the bios says: PCI Devices Listing ... Bus Dev Fun Vendor Device SVID SSID Class Device Class IRQ --- --- --- ------ ------ ---- ---- ----- -------------------- --- 0 29 0 8086 24D2 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 11 0 29 1 8086 24D4 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 9 0 29 2 8086 24D7 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 5 0 29 3 8086 24DE 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 11 0 29 7 8086 24DD 1458 5006 0C03 USB 2.0 Host Cntrlr 5 0 31 1 8086 24DB 1458 24D2 0101 IDE Cntrlr 14 0 31 2 8086 24D1 1458 24DF 0101 Native IDE Cntrlr 5 0 31 3 8086 24D3 1458 24D2 0C05 SMBus Cntrlr 10 0 31 5 8086 24D5 1458 A002 0401 Multimedia Device 10 1 0 0 1002 4E45 1002 0002 0300 Display Cntrlr 11 2 1 0 8086 1019 8086 1019 0200 Network Cntrlr 5 3 10 0 104C 8024 0000 0000 0C00 IEEE 1394 Host Cntrlr 11 3 11 0 1095 3112 1095 3112 0180 Mass Storage Cntrlr 9 3 12 0 1283 8212 1283 0001 0104 RAID Cntrlr 10 ACPI Controller 9 FreeBSD 4.8-20030810-STABLE (the most recent stable snapshot I could find) seems to have drivers for the "native mode" PCI parallel and serial ATA controllers on the ICH5R chip, the USB controllers on the ICH5R chip, the Intel 82547EI ethernet chip, and the TI TSB43AB23 firewire chip. FreeBSD 4.8-20030810-STABLE does not seem to have drivers for either of the raid chips or the audio chip and it describes the USB ports as version 1.0 rather than 2.0. FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE has similar support. FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE lacks some of the drivers found in the newer releases (I forget which). Summary: FreeBSD-stable and FreeBSD-5.1 support for the new motherboards looks good enough to start with, but I would sure like to have support for the audio chip (so I don't have to use up a PCI slot for an audio card) and being able to attach more ATA drives to the motherboard might be very useful. There is some hope: the audio system claims to be AC97 compatible and there is a Linux driver for the ITE 8212 raid chip. Dan Strick strick@covad.net
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