James wrote:
At least my Asus NF4 motherboard seems to support everything with Open Source software. Everything I need, anyway.
which board/chipset exactly? And what is not supported, even if you don't use it?
Also thanks for all your other useful advice,
Webber
I wrote:
At least my Asus NF4 motherboard seems to support everything with Open Source software. Everything I need, anyway.
dondi_2006 asked:
which board/chipset exactly? And what is not supported, even if you don't use it?
Well, mine's a A8N-SLI ATX motherboard (which won't fit your case), with a NForce 4 SLI chipset. Like you, I wanted PCI Express for future-proofing. The SLI wasn't expensive when I got the board, which did everything I wanted (and there weren't many AMD PCI Express boards to choose from at the time). And I'm not convinced that 250 MB/s is going to be enough for the foreseeable future, so although I don't intend to use the SLI capability for its advertised purpose (accelerating 3D games), it's nice to have a spare 8x slot if I need it.
As for "what is not supported": what I meant was that everything I have tried works. Everything I haven't tried I don't know about, because I haven't tried it. I think that's mainly the IEEE 1394 and the SATA ports.
Although having said that, the Usual Place says that the SATA side works ( http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html ). And I've no reason to believe the 1394 ports won't work.
I suppose I should point out that the on-board NVidia Ethernet device works well with the in-kernel forcedeth driver, but that this driver does not support all the offload capabilities of the hardware. For example, there is supposed to be a hardware firewall in the chipset. That's not supported: you have to fall back to the Linux kernel firewall. This isn't a major drawback of the chipset: on any other on-board Ethernet device, you simply wouldn't have the capability there, rather than "there but disabled".
A few more features should be supported in future kernels. For example, it looks like hardware TX checksumming and scatter gather and segmentation offload support is coming: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-November/msg00442.htm... If you don't know what these are, they mean the hardware can do some of the work that the kernel would otherwise have to do.
I should note that I have seen (and used under Windows) a micro-ATX version of this board. It only has one 16x PCI Express slot: the rest are PCI. But it looks like http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=15&l3=0&model=768&... is the current equivalent: this does have on-board video and an extra PCI Express slot. It doesn't have the NVidia Ethernet device, though.
Hope this helps,
James.
On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 07:42 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
As for "what is not supported": what I meant was that everything I have tried works. Everything I haven't tried I don't know about, because I haven't tried it. I think that's mainly the IEEE 1394 and the SATA ports.
Although having said that, the Usual Place says that the SATA side works ( http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html ). And I've no reason to believe the 1394 ports won't work.
Makes me think that it'd be a very good thing if someone made some testing kits that new board buyers could load, test everything out, including things they're not likely to use, and produce a report.
I've seen so-called benchmarking programs for Windows, but they're generally just megs/sec bragging sort of things. Not a test that checks that bits going through a port come out unscathed under certain conditions, etc.
-
dondi_2006 -
James Wilkinson -
Tim