amd64 as an X desktop?

[Peter Wemm]

Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> KDE-FreeBSD is starting to work on getting KDE running on ia64. A lousy
> task, since there's no X port, and no gdb either. Plus, ia64 boxes are
> ruddy expensive, and so there's not enough of them to play with. I was
> thinking of getting an amd64 box to play with, to perhaps sort out some of
> the other 32-bit x86 linux-centric stuff in KDE. However, I'm a KDE guy,
> not a kernel, X, or gdb guy, so I need to have that basis stable before I
> can get anything done.
> 
> How's X's stability on amd64 right now? Does gdb work?

The XFree86-4 ports build and mostly work.  It doesn't work well on some of
the older vga drivers (a 1996 vintage trident card that I tried), but does
work on the matrox/ati/nvidia cards the last time I tried.  I run it on
a matrox g450 at work.  As far as stability goes, it was bomb proof up
until a few weeks ago when I got a segfault during a 'make release' and
Alan Cox got a lost interrupt somewhere.  That may have been generic
5.x problems though, but the interrupt thing is a more interesting
issue.  Having said that, it does work pretty well.  I'm in the process of
switching my primary desktop boxes (home and work) to amd64 machines.
I just haven't quite gotten around to moving the files over yet.  David
O'Brien had trouble with an nvidia card I believe.

We do have a gdb that does work, but its a "special" build based on a
prerelease pre-gdb-6.0-tree.  My experience with it so far suggest that it
actually seems to work a little better than the one in /usr/src at the
moment.  I should put the binary in a more accessible place.

Having said all that, it hasn't been officially promoted to tier-1 status
yet, mostly because I wanted to hold off on an ABI-break before doing that.
It looks like I dont need to do it after all.  In reality it is in better
shape than some of our other tier-1 platforms, but keeping a pair of
peril-sensitive sunglasses nearby would be a good strategy.

If you want to pick up a machine,  I've booted FreeBSD on both the asus SK8N
and gigabyte K8N Pro (both nvidia nforce3 based).  I have not tried the
asus K8V or whatever it is called (via K8T800 chipset based).  I've been meaning
to try out a via based system to make sure there are no suprises.

No, we do not have a driver for the onboard nvidia ethernet on the nforce3,
but some of the boards I've seen have a realtek 8110 based gigabit ethernet
(no driver) or a 3com/marvell gigabit chip (I dont know what this chip is).

The ATA driver doesn't recognize some of the SATA or RAID hardware on these
boards, but I've been able to use plain IDE drives no problem.

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