Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 14 May 2015 05:07:02 +0200
From:      Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To:        "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam@hiwaay.net>
Cc:        "FreeBSD Questions !!!!" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Oddball question
Message-ID:  <20150514050702.184d7650.freebsd@edvax.de>
In-Reply-To: <55536BF0.5010706@hiwaay.net>
References:  <55536BF0.5010706@hiwaay.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, 13 May 2015 10:27:35 -0453, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> I am running FreeBSD 9.3R-p13 on this box, & love it, everything now 
> smooth as silk, all is well. Thus I can't resist changing something up 
> to make it even better ;-). This mbd is a mini-ITX Asrock socket FT3 
> board, w/ (soldered-on) AMD Sempron 3850 CPU, jaguar/kabini class, 1.3 
> GHz. There is a newer version of that board w/ a AMD FT3 Kabini A4-5000 
> Quad-Core APU, running at 2 GHz, also jaguar/kabini class. If I were to 
> swap out the mbds, how much trouble does anyone think that would cause ? 
> I fantasize that it would boot & run fine, given that most of the 
> controllers (I/O, GPU) are on chip, so it sounds tempting to me .... 
> Anyu thoughts ? TIA & have a good one.

What you're thinking of is actually quite common on FreeBSD:
You move a hard disk to a new system and boot, and usually
most things will work. This also applies if you swap the main
board. As you stated, they're both the same "class". The only
significant difference might be the graphics "card". If you
run X without xorg.conf, it will probably pick up the correct
driver (if the GPU is supported), or abort. Everything else
on the system probably won't be affected. FreeBSD does not
require you to manually install drivers to be able to use the
fundamental functions of a computer - drivers will be loaded
automatically, because the kernel already contains them. As
I said, graphics are the common "problem" here. It might be
required to upgrade the GPU driver (for X, not for the OS)
or install a different one (like when you switch from a machine
with ATi GPU to a machine with nVidia GPU). And if it does _not_
work well enough to convince you, you can easily switch back.
No need to re-install the OS and all your programs to get rid
of "offending drivers" that keep crashing your system. ;-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20150514050702.184d7650.freebsd>