Recommendations?

[Astrodog]

On 4/19/05, David O'Brien <obrien at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 01:05:00PM +0200, Dag-Erling Smrgrav wrote:
> > "O. Hartmann" <ohartman at mail.uni-mainz.de> writes:
> > > My question si: how to force nVidia delivering the needed
> > > informations? It should be an aspect of customer demand. nVidia
> > > earns money with each sold nForce based motherboard and each GForce
> > > based graphics card and the better the support, the more they can
> > > sell.
> >
> > Why would they care about FreeBSD users?  Unlike Linux, FreeBSD has
> > approximately zero brainshare in the computer press, and unlike
> > FreeBSD, Linux runs perfectly well on nForce chipsets.  In fact, the
> > Asus SK8N which David loathes is "Linux-certified".
> 
> You have NO idea how many hoops Linux jumps thru to run on the Asus SK8N.
> Let me repeat to you again -- _I_ was the first person to try to run
> 64-bit Linux on this motherboard.  It didn't work.  The Linux kernel grew
> many, many patches to deal with this motherboard and so you should be
> saying it is only "Linux-certified" for newer versions of Linux.
> 
> However, I can run older FreeBSD versions on both AMD and VIA baesd
> motherboards (ie, FreeBSD versions released before the chipsets were
> produced).  What does that tell you??
> 
> > If I didn't already know that FreeBSD is perfect and flawless and that
> > David is the Christ reborn, I'd be tempted to conclude that there is
> > something wrong with FreeBSD (or David), not with the nForce chipset.
> 
> If I didn't already know DES was a huge ass....
> 

Oddly enough, the motherboard in the R3000Z mobiles, once the keyboard
patch, and DSDT table are setup, works great. Its an nForce3 150 based
thing. I suspect the problem is more with the BIOS implimentation,
than the chipset itself, thus explaining the mixed results everyone is
having. I would be extremely hesitant to reccomend nforce3 equipment,
simply because a rather large percentage of it doesn't work. Even on
this platform (The R3000Zs), there are some pretty ardious steps you
have to go through, that involve SSHing in to get DSDT dumps, etc.

Certainly reccomending something that causes a performance hit, and
limited functionality isn't a great idea, when better, completely
functional alternatives exist, for the same price.

Not sure its worth anything, but gotta agree with David on this one.

--- Harrison Grundy