Any experience with "Asus A8N-SLi" or "Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI" mobos?

[David O'Brien]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 11:36:49AM +0000, Mark Magiera wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 19:33:38 +0000
> Mark Magiera <mark at hyow.eu.org> wrote:
> > The thing I'm unsure about is, how well are the nforce4 chipsets
> > supported in FreeBSD? and what about PCI-E, would one of those mobo's
> > in combination with a PCI-E nvidia card work?
..
> > Any advice would be much appreciated
..
> Ok, quick update. I finally bought the mobo (Asus A8N-SLi) along with a
> 6600GT PCI-E and while there are a few problems, they seem the kind that
> can be ironed out over time.

Sorry I missed your original email, or I would have warned you.
No committer had an AMD PCIe or nVidia nForce4 motherboard until this
past weekend.  AMD donated 2 motherboards to Scott Long who did the Intel
PCIe work.  So you're a little ahead of the game right now.

The FreeBSD interest and work on PCIe has been for storage and network
(e.g. server) devices, not graphics.  So I have no idea how well PCIe
(much less PCIe-SLi) is supported yet.  A donation of a nice PCIe
graphics card to Scottl would probably help the effort along. :-)))))


> Basically, freebsd installs in both 32 and 64 bit mode but in both
> cases, the network card is so unreliable that half way through a cvsup
> (or anything else) it dies and nothing (that I know of) but a reboot
> fixes it, this is for the "sk" device.

What OS version are you running?  For the AMD64 platform you really,
really need to be tracking RELENG_5, if not 6-CURRENT.  5.3-RELEASE is
our first real AMD64 release and of course we're now getting 2 orders of
magnitude more testing exposure than when it was only a few developers
with AMD64 machines.  FreeBSD/AMD64 will get as polished and stable as
FreeBSD/i386 over a very short time.

If you have sk(4) problems with RELENG_5, please send a PR with complete
details and a dmesg.boot from a verbose boot.


> As for the other nic (the nforce
> one), I didn't look into it much but it seems there's no driver for it
> except one possibly (ports/net/nvnet) but since I'm unable to even do a
> simple cvsup with the other card, it's not much use. Also the nvnet
> driver is for 32bit mode only.

Stop supporting nVidia by buying nForce-based motherboards.  Or complain
to nVidia that they (1) won't give us docs even under NDA, (2) won't
provide a FreeBSD driver like they do for Linux.  These mailing lists are
filled with all the problems of nForce motherboards, yet FreeBSD users
keep buying them...

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)