Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:09:41 +0000 From: Frank Shute <frank@shute.org.uk> To: ThinkDifferently <Jeremy@FutureCIS.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Vetting motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Message-ID: <20081220010941.GA77575@melon.esperance-linux.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <21077043.post@talk.nabble.com> References: <21077043.post@talk.nabble.com>
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On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 09:15:33AM -0800, ThinkDifferently wrote: > > > I'm currently looking for an ATX motherboard that supports the AM2+ socket, > Phenom Quad-Core processor, 4 DDR2 RAM slots (800 MHz is fine), 6 SATA ports > with RAID, and Gigabit LAN. Onboard VGA would be nice. > > It needs to work well with FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, using a 2-disk SATA RAID1. > > I'm currently looking at the Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H. > > Has anyone successfully operated 7.0 on this board? > Any booting issues? Did you need to modify the ISO to get it to boot (if so > how)? > Did RAID work? Did it require a special driver to be loaded (if so how)? > > Do any other motherboards fit the bill, given the specifications I give > above? > > I recently got a black eye &-( with the MSI K9N2G Neo-FD, using the GeForce > 8200 (MCP78) chipset. FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and CentOS 5.2 wouldn't even boot > on it, no matter what the BIOS config was. Also, Vista wouldn't even > recognize the SATA disks, even if the SATA ports were in IDE, RAID or AHCI > modes (it requires a driver, even if you aren't doing RAID). > -- I haven't used that MB but I am using a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L (core2) so I'll offer some general advice since no one else seems to want to! ;) I've had good luck with anything by Asus and Gigabyte. I tend to avoid boards with bleeding edge hardware/features as these will not have received so much testing (and may not even be supported) on FreeBSD. This in practice means get a board that's been on sale for a bit. None of my machines are configured for RAID but as a general point, most on this list use software RAID in the form of geom/geli/gmirror etc. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom.html The consensus seems to be that it's just as good as hardware raid performance-wise. There was a thread on this list about it a few months ago. I'd use FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 if I was building a FreeBSD machine today for production purposes as it will be more uptodate with respect drivers for newer hardware and most bugs will have been shaken out this close to release. My compatibilty check for hardware usually consists of going to Google and punching in FreeBSD and the name of the hardware. This usually brings up hits which indicate the level of support. HTH. Regards, -- Frank Contact info: http://www.shute.org.uk/misc/contact.html
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