Intel SE7520BD2 motherboard

[Toomas Aas]

Hello!

Some friends of mine are looking to buy a new server hardware based on  
Intel SE7520BD2 motherboard for their FreeBSD server (6.0 or whatever  
is the latest release in a month or two). The plan is to use two  
mirrored SCSI disks as main storage and one (S)ATA disk for backups.  
Two LAN connections are necessary.

I've been trying to figure out how well all the integrated features of  
this motherboard are supported by FreeBSD. So far, these are my findings

- SCSI/RAID controller: LSI1030 - explicitly noted in hardware notes,  
also I'm running one of these with FreeBSD 5.4 right now so this  
should be OK;

- First integrated NIC: Intel 82541PI - explicitly noted in hardware  
notes, so should be OK;

- Second integrated NIC: Marvell Yukon EC88E8050 - nothing about this  
in hardware notes, but a binary FreeBSD 6 driver can be downloaded  
from Marvell's website. I have no experience using third-party binary  
drivers with FreeBSD, so I'm a bit hesitant here. If I get this driver  
working with FreeBSD 6.0, can I expect it to still work with 6.1, 6.2,  
etc? Given the usual warnings how kernel and userland must be kept in  
sync when upgrading, I think this is even more true about kernel and  
modules. Am I possibly commiting myself to running an outdated 6.x  
release by using this third-party binary driver?

- Intel ICH5R SATA controller. Also not explicitly noted in hardware  
notes, at least not in 'Disk controllers' section. Couldn't find  
anything definitive by googling. I'm not interested in possible RAID  
features, would it work if I just connected a single SATA disk to this  
controller?

Overall, would you recommend this motherboard for running FreeBSD 6?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.
-- 
Toomas Aas