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From: "David Alderman" <DAVE@persprog.com>
Organization:  Personalized Programming, Inc.
To: Javier Martin Rueda <jmrueda@diatel.upm.es>, hardware@FreeBSD.org
Date:          Wed, 18 Oct 1995 17:00:19 EST
Subject:       Re: motherboards with parity?
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> Are you sure about what you say of the Neptune boards?
> 
> I'm planning to buy an ASUS PCI/I-P54NP4D motherboard (dual Pentium)
> and, initially, will run Solaris 2.4 for Intel on it. However, I may
> run FreeBSD in the future, when it supports SMP.
> 
> Anyhow, that motherboard uses the Neptune chipset, and I will put at
> least a couple of PCI cards in it (SCSI and Ethernet).
> 
> Also, will that mainboard be supported by FreeBSD/SMP?
> 
Alas, what he says is true.  I have an ASUS PCI/E P54NP4 board at work with 
only one CPU and we have not been able to get a PCI network card to 
work it.  Of course, this machine is running SCO Unix which is not as 
well supported as FreeBSD;)  Since our board has EISA slots as well, 
we solved the problem with an EISA network card.  A non bus-mastering 
PCI ethernet card might work, but that sort of defeats the purpose of 
using a high performance card (fast with low CPU overhead).
If you really need SMP, and you want to run two bus-mastering 
devices, you might consider getting the EISA version of the board if 
it is still available.

Maybe a non-Intel chipset motherboard supports both SMP and 
multiple bus mastering.  Anybody else have any ideas?
======================================
When philosophy conflicts with reality, choose reality.
Dave Alderman  -- dave@persprog.com
======================================