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Date:      Fri, 10 May 1996 15:31:32 -0600
From:      Eric Varsanyi <ewv@boom.bsdi.com>
To:        "David Alderman" <dave@persprog.com>
Cc:        smatthew@ccnet.com, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Motherboards 
Message-ID:  <199605102131.PAA22898@boom.vars.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 10 May 1996 16:09:45 EST." <22EB825675B@novell.persprog.com> 

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>> > I would recommend ASUS boards in general.  They have a fairly good 
>> > track record.  To get parity, you will need either a Triton II or a 
>> > Neptune board (the Triton II is the newer chipset).  Does anybody 
>> > have a Triton II (82430HX) board working with FreeBSD?
>> 
>> I have qualified the ASUS PCI/I-P55T2P4 board and am shipping product
>> at this time.

One gotcha with the ASUS boards are that they either: a) didn't wire
the B-D PCI interrupts to anything or b) their BIOS doesn't understand
how to program their interrupt routing.

This is only a problem if you want to run something on the other
side of a PCI-PCI bridge chip (like the SMC EtherPower 2). A properly
implemented PCI card will attach the interrupt pin on each device
on the subordinate bus to the main pins in sequence (dev1/pin A -> pin A,
dev2/pin A -> pin B, etc...).  In the case of the EtherPower2 pin
A on the PCI slot is connected to the first ethernet device and
pin B to the second.

ASUS doesn't seem to understand what a PCI-PCI bridge is and why
someone might want to use one. Their BIOS only detects and initializes
the first PCI device on a subordinate bus (which is better than
nothing!).  After several months of fruitless bantering with ASUS
I gave up and switched to Tyan (1462) for new machines. Having said
that, as long as you never want to use anything with a PCI-PCI
bridge ASUS makes good motherboards.

-Eric Varsanyi
 Berkeley Software Design Inc.



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