On 2006/01/19 17:54, Joakim Roubert wrote: > On 2006-01-19 17:43, Stuart Henderson wrote: > > > Try looking for a BIOS setting called something like legacy/native, > > and toggle it. By doing that, I got M5289 to function (DMA unsupported, > > but even with onboard disks it still completes 'make build' faster than > > anything else I have, and I think I'll put my ami(4) in that box > > anyway). > > Ok, I won't have the real RAID-H/W as an option, so the question is what > "anything else" you have... :) How slow is the system without DMA? I > would guess it would be horrible, but perhaps it is not?
CPU is fast enough that it wasn't horribly slow, but obviously not as good as it could be. "anything else" - in my case, the next fastest is a celeron 2ghz (my asrock board has an opteron 146). I haven't seen any reliability problems with it, but I haven't worked it harder than a few cvs pulls and 'make build's. > Now I have tried some different actions, and FreeBSD 6.0 finds the disks > right away (but not the network, but perhaps it is easier to tinker > with that compared to the disk stuff?). SuSE Linux seems to support the nic about the best. I don't see anything in FreeBSD cvsweb to indicate that their -current would be any more likely to support the nic but it may be worth trying (it took very many clicks to find cvsweb after their website redesign - oops!) > Unfortunately, I am not that much of a home-hacker, so I would like to > fit the most secure and stable minimal UN*X system on this one. What > would you do in my situation? If it can be made to work without DMA somehow, try it and see if it performs acceptably. (I don't know what's involved to make DMA work and haven't had time to look at it yet). If not, I'd probably fit a PCI card, most of the SATA cards are SiI3112 or some other equally supported chip, see pciide(4) for a list. They cost about 10-15 pounds/euros/dollars from the cheaper retailers. Many of the cheap 'sata raid' cards will work fine as a plain sata controller. Not very useful to you, but I'll mention it anyway - the newest onchip SATA controllers from ULi and other manufacturers are mostly AHCI SATA2, which is not supported on OpenBSD yet either, but at least you can download the spec, which is a good start...
