Motherboard Recommendation for Freebsd 7.0 32-bit or 64-bit

[chilo]

Has anyone used an Intel board with raid compatibility? If I can't push hardware I guess I'm off to using software raid. many thanks.




________________________________
From: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at FreeBSD.org>
To: Daniel Eischen <deischen at freebsd.org>
Cc: chilo <olihc17 at yahoo.com>; freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org; pyunyh at gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2008 11:03:51 PM
Subject: Re: Motherboard  Recommendation for Freebsd 7.0 32-bit or 64-bit

On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 09:29:15AM -0500, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Nov 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 11:05:19PM -0800, chilo wrote:
>>> Hi guys I'm new when it comes to using Freebsd but can you recommend
>>> me a motherboard(s) that will support Freebsd 7.0? It will have at
>>> least RAID 1 configuration with full driver support. I'm planning to
>>> install Freebsd to a clone PC so that I can continue my progress/self
>>> training. Thank you very much.
>>
>> Most consumer motherboards will work.
>>
>> However, with regards to "RAID 1 configuration", what are you planning
>> on using for RAID 1?  A RAID controller, or something like gmirror(8)
>> which is software/OS-based RAID in FreeBSD?  (Most people will strongly
>> recommend using software/OS-based RAID, for a lot of good reasons.)
>
> I'm in the market for a decent motherboard also.  Been monitoring
> slickdeals lately - newegg seems to have specials every now and
> then on the ASUS P5Q Pro.  The reviews I've read seem pretty
> positive on this board.  Anyone with any experience with this
> board?

Yes, there are some of us in the FreeBSD community who have experience
with the P5Q series.

The first issue you'll run into is lack of Ethernet support on FreeBSD.
I've worked with Yong-Hyeon PYUN on this, sending him a new P5Q SE
motherboard, and he was able to develop a driver for it (it is in no way
optimised for speed, but it does work).  The driver is not part of the
FreeBSD source code yet.  See my "Networking" section here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues

If you want the driver, Yong-Hyeon can provide it.  I've CC'd him here.

The second issue you'll run into, at least on the P5Q SE, is a 10-15
second delay when enabling AHCI mode in the BIOS (for the Intel ICH).
Machine will POST, then sit there for 10-15 seconds with a blinking
cursor before booting any disk (and after that, works fine).  Switch
back to Enhanced mode and the problem disappears.  I find this very odd,
as no other ICH-based AHCI system I have behaves this way; very likely a
BIOS bug/problem.

Note: despite owning a P5Q SE board, I do not use it for FreeBSD (I run
Windows on my desktops, and FreeBSD on my servers).

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                      http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |