LG combo drive and Attansic Technology ethernet card on Asus P5Q Pro

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 04:50:36PM +0200, Giuseppe Pagnoni wrote:
> thank you very much for your help.  I downloaded the 7.1 prerelease,
> but unfortunately didn't solve the problem with the CD/DVD.  As for
> the ethernet card, it's a kind of catch 22: to see if the card is
> working I should install the OS, but I cannot from the DVD.

Understood.  This situation is very frustrating; people often run into
on Windows as well ("How do I get the Ethernet driver for my NIC from
the web site if Windows doesn't already have support for my NIC?!").

> I cannot even install over FTP, because the institution I am in wants
> my MAC address to allow this pc to connect to internet and I cannot
> get to the MAC address without installing an OS (at least, I don't
> know how... I tried an Ubuntu LiveCD, but it doesn't recognize the
> ethernet card, either).

Yong-Hyeon covered this; I was incorrect in assuming the Attansic L1E
was just a PCI Express version of the L1.  They are apparently different
chips and are initialised differently.  Yong-Hyeon doesn't have access
to any hardware which uses the L1E, so writing a driver for it is going
to be a bit difficult.  :-( If needed, I can ship him an Asus P5Q SE
board + CPU/RAM for testing and development (I have the CPU/RAM, but I
would need to purchase the board).

As far as the ATA/IDE stuff goes, that's going to be more difficult.
I'm really surprised FreeBSD doesn't work with it.  I might have to
experiment with why that is on my own P5Q SE box; this would require
Soren Schmidt (ata(4) author)'s involvement.

> Since I have other problems with this machine, I am thinking about
> returning it. I wonder whether you could point  me to some sure
> FreeBSD compatible hardware which is in the ballpark of this machine
> in terms of configuration. I tried to look in the Release Hardware
> note, but it's a bit difficult for me to match all the hardware codes
> to their physical counterparts!  This is what I have currently:

My recommendation would be to keep the motherboard and purchase two
pieces of hardware:

1) Intel Pro/1000 PT NIC (PCI Express) -- about US$35-45,
2) Any SATA-based Pioneer DVD drive -- about US$25-30.

If you were in the States I'd send you the NIC free of cost, as my way
of saying "I'm sorry for all the issues you're having with FreeBSD's
hardware support".  But I see you're in Italy.  :-)

If you want to go with another NIC, that's fine too -- I would recommend
staying away from Realtek NICs.  If you can find an older Intel Pro/100
NIC somewhere, that might be cheaper; those use the fxp(4) driver.

This should allow you to get online reliably, and allow you to perform
the FreeBSD installation using a SATA-based DVD drive hooked to the ICH
controller, rather than the Marvell ATA/IDE controller.

When FreeBSD gets support for the Attansic L1E chip, switching over to
it would be painless.  :-)

>     RAM: 4 GB, 800 Mhz (by the way, I never understood if the
> processor can address or not 4GB... should I just get 3GB?)

The processor and system *most definitely* can address more than 4GB.
It just depends on how the OS supports it.

FreeBSD has two flavours: i386 (32-bit) and amd64 (64-bit).

i386 can address up to 4GB of RAM natively (see below), but you will
probably only get ~3GB of that usable.  The reason is limited memory
address space; PCI Express, ACPI, and many other features (I can provide
you a list or reference material if you want to see) cause some of the
memory addressing space to be taken up.

If you install more than 4GB on i386, you will have to use what's known
as PAE mode.  It's an Intel addressing extension to support >4GB of RAM
on i386.  There are many problems with it though; there's a performance
hit, and there are known issues with drivers and FreeBSD features which
you cannot use in PAE mode.

When it comes to i386, I recommend people stick with 2 or 3GB, and avoid
PAE mode at all costs.

amd64 can address up to 256TB of RAM.  Don't let the "amd64" term make
you think it's intended for AMD processors; it works fine on both Intel
and AMD processors.  If you plan on installing 4GB or more memory in a
system, I recommend considering amd64.

However, there's one thing I remember reading somewhere.  Someone will
have to correct me if I'm wrong -- if you plan on using X Windows on an
am64 system, be aware that nVidia does not provide an amd64-compatible
video driver for FreeBSD.

Hope this helps in your decisions.

-- 
| 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 |