From owner-freebsd-hardware Fri May 10 14:32:19 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA26041 for hardware-outgoing; Fri, 10 May 1996 14:32:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from boom.vars.com (boom.BSDI.COM [205.230.226.129]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA26031 for ; Fri, 10 May 1996 14:32:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from boom.vars.com (localhost.vars.com [127.0.0.1]) by boom.vars.com (8.7.3/8.6.5) with ESMTP id PAA22898; Fri, 10 May 1996 15:31:32 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <199605102131.PAA22898@boom.vars.com> To: "David Alderman" cc: smatthew@ccnet.com, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Motherboards In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 10 May 1996 16:09:45 EST." <22EB825675B@novell.persprog.com> Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 15:31:32 -0600 From: Eric Varsanyi Sender: owner-hardware@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >> > 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.