Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 04:58:58 -0600 From: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net> To: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> Cc: Jeremiah Gowdy <jgowdy@home.com>, KT Sin <ktsin@acm.org>, freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: via chipset and SMP Message-ID: <20001112045858.A7123@peorth.iteration.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011101303530.17251-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us>; from cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us on Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 01:28:47PM -0600 References: <006301c04ab3$b70121c0$aa240018@cx443070b> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011101303530.17251-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us>
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On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 01:28:47PM -0600, Chris Dillon scribbled: | On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Jeremiah Gowdy wrote: | > > > I am thinking of getting a dual coppermine board with VIA chipset. | > > > Has anyone tried running FreeBSD SMP on such boards? Is the VIA's | > > > SMP chipset any good? | | > > Even their non-SMP chipsets are crap. It blew my mind that they had | > > the ability to create an SMP chipset at all, let alone make one that | > > might work. | | > My counter opinion would simply be, I have ran FreeBSD on my Tyan | > Tiger 133A motherboard which uses the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset | > with Dual Pentium III 450s. They aren't the best performing | > boards out there, however, they are pretty stable in my | > experience, both Athlon and PIII. Add that to the fact that they | > support the latest tech like AGP4X and UDMA100. Their chipsets do | > lack a little performance, but not so much as to make me wish I | > had another board. Dual Pentium IIIs are still Dual Pentium IIIs. VIA chipsets have compatibility problems with many PCI/ISA cards. | Sure, the chipsets do work. Sometimes. Maybe. If you hold your | breath. | recently the 760 to speak of). Even some of our (FreeBSD's) own I think the AMD 760 will be much nicer than VIA. | driver writers have kvetched about how VIA or | insert-other-lowball-chipset-maker-here has not followed this or that | PCI spec or things of that nature. Intel apparently puts quite a bit | more compatibility testing into their chipsets, and follows | specifications closely (usually). I'm not sure if VIA, SiS, or ALi's | inability to create decent chipsets is because of a lack of access to | important standards information, lack of engineering ability, or for From what I understand by talking to VIA/D-Link/Realtek developers that I went to school with in Taiwan, their development (and especially testing/verification) models are not the envy of the world. <insert many juicy, interesting, and horrifying stories here> Sometimes, it's the management pushing deadlines too hard, and sometimes it's just that they lack the years of design experience/technology of companies like AMD/Motorola/IBM/Intel. Or it is the pointy-haired bosses, and maybe a combination of the above. | other reasons (like, they're low-end, low-price chipsets, and you get | what you pay for). D-Link's company idea is to go for low-end, low-price. See Bill Paul's if_rl.c comments. :) -- +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | keichii@peorth.iteration.net | keichii@bsdconspiracy.net | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
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