Summary of experience with amd64 mainboards?

[Peter Wemm]

Matthias Bauer wrote:
> Hi,
> since quite a variety of mainboards for the amd64 are
> available now, it would be very useful if members of this
> mailing list would announce on which chipsets/mainboards
> they got the amd64 port to run (and what devices on the
> boards are not working as yet). It would also be nice to
> put the result on the project page.

The ones I have personal experience with are:

940 pin:
Asus SK8N: works (nForce3 chipset, no driver for onboard nVidia nic, onboard
                  promise 378 raid+SATA)
Rioworks HDAMA: works (AMD chipset, 2 cpu, onboard if_bge gigabit, in use on
                  the freebsd.org cluster as sledge.freebsd.org and at work)

754 pin:
Asus K8V: works (VIA K8T800 chipset, onboard ide not recognized without
                 patch which has integrated SATA support, decent onboard
                 3com/syskonnect gigabit nic (if_sk), onboard promise 378
                 raid+SATA)
Gigabyte K8NPro: works (nForce3, lousy tiny bios interface, realtek 8110
                 gigabit nic (if_re) - supposedly not bad.  onboard nVidia
                 ethernet isn't connected (but we dont have a driver anyway)).
AMD Solo4, Solo5 and Solo7 (developer reference boards)

I really like both of the ASUS boards for personal use and the Rioworks for
servers.  I have not seen any of the MSI boards so I can't vouch for them.
The MSI 2xCPU board only has 2 dimm slots on one of the cpus so I'm not
that interested in their server board.  Their consumer board appears to
have similar specs to the asus K8V but I haven't tried it.

All of these boards work with ACPI, minus some quirks with ordering the
serial ports.  Some of them list the COM2 port first in the tables which
means we assign 'sio0' to it.  Thats only a minor annoyance though.

The onboard nVidia ethernet is annoying because they only give out a binary
driver blob that you write an OS shim to use.  This works for i386, but
obviously isn't going to work too well for an amd64 kernel.  The only board
affected by this is the Asus SK8N, but ethernet cards are not a big deal.

I really really dislike the bios on the Gigabyte, and really like the ones
on the ASUS boards.  The Gigabyte bios interface is almost worthless and
gives you very little control over anything.  If it had to be named, I'd
call it a 'BIOS for dummies'.  On the other hand, the ASUS bios' give you
more than enough rope.  For example, Gigabyte have 'PNP OS: Yes' by default
and dont give you the ability to turn it off.  ASUS do let you turn it off.

Cheers,
-Peter
--
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