cvs commit: src/sys/i386/pci pci_cfgreg.c

[Peter Wemm]

On Monday 13 December 2004 05:33 pm, David O'Brien wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 02:16:53PM -0800, Peter Wemm wrote:
> > On Monday 13 December 2004 01:47 pm, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
> > > "David O'Brien" <obrien at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > > > At the moment I don't know of anyone with an AMD64 PCI Express
> > > > motherboard.
> > >
> > > The Celestica A8440 has dual onboard PCI-X NICs and two PCI-X
> > > slots. Surely someone in the project should be able to get their
> > > hands on one?  I for one would love to have one for the
> > > tinderbox...
> > >
> > > DES
> >
> > Just for clarity, we were talking about PCI-Express, not PCI-X.
> >
> > BTW, I think it is amusing that the only machines readily available
> > that have PCI-Express to run FreeBSD/amd64 on are Intel systems...
>
> Why?
> Today there is zero benefit to PCI-Express vs. AGP 8x or PCI-X
> 133mhz.

Just like there was zero benefit to having a prototype amd64 machine to 
do porting work on before they started coming out in retail?  At the 
time, there was zero benefit compared to a 32 bit Athlon-XP system.

It's going to suck when they do reach the stores and our answer to 
support questions is "no", while Linux and windows do.

On that note, we still barely support anything more from AMD's platform 
than the basic instruction set due to lack of documentation..  That's 
why FreeBSD/amd64 ran so quickly on the Intel hardware.   We only used 
the most basic features of the generic instruction set in an otherwise 
PC platform.  We don't take advantage of the IOMMU, the timers, etc.  
(Still no documentation).  I'd have expected AMD to push as hard as 
they can to get every advantage while Intel is still trying to recover 
their balance.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5