FreeBSD STABLE support for new motherboards
From: Dan Strick (strick_at_covad.net)
Date: 08/21/03
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Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 01:46:46 -0700 (PDT) To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
During the last two weeks there has been some discussion in
freebsd-questions and freebsd-stable about the prospects of FreeBSD
support for some motherboard devices associated with the Intel
865PE/875P and ICH5/ICH5R support chips now showing up in recent
motherboard designs. The 865PE/875P chips are called MCH (memory
controller hub) or "northbridge" chips. The ICH5/ICH5R chips are
called ICH (i/o controller hub) or "southbridge" chips.
The 865PE/875P chips are used on most new motherboards that support
the new "hyperthreaded" P4 cpus with "800 MHz" front side busses.
The 865PE is an 875P with some features disabled. The ICH5R is an
ICH5 with some limited raid support for its serial ATA ports
(allegedly only Windows XP has a driver for this feature).
I recently ordered a Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard, which is perhaps
characteristic of this new motherboard genre, and was concerned about
the following motherboard devices:
2 parallel ATA ports - ICH5R
2 parallel ATA ports - ITE 8212 raid chip attached to ICH5R
2 serial ATA ports - ICH5R
2 serial ATA ports - Sil3112 raid chip attached to ICH5R
8 USB 2.0 ports - ICH5R
3 firewire ports - TI TSB43AB23 chip attached to ICH5R
gigabit ethernet - Intel 82547EI chip attached to 875P
audio - Realtek ALC655 CODEC attached to ICH5R
Note: the Intel 82547EI chip is rather common on 875P motherboards
because it is one of the very few ethernet controllers that can attach
directly to the 875P chip. The two raid chips and the audio chip may
be less common.
The HARDWARE.TXT files in the FreeBSD 4.8 and 5.1 releases claimed
no support for the raid and audio chips and support for only older
versions of the other chips. It seemed likely that the first two
parallel ATA ports would be supported in a "legacy" (generic ISA)
mode, but support for the other devices looked rather uncertain.
I just got my new motherboard and enough other hardware together to boot
FreeBSD installation media and see what the bootstrap device configuration
monologue said (but not enough other supporting hardware to actually
install and run FreeBSD).
When my motherboard boots, the bios says:
PCI Devices Listing ...
Bus Dev Fun Vendor Device SVID SSID Class Device Class IRQ
--- --- --- ------ ------ ---- ---- ----- -------------------- ---
0 29 0 8086 24D2 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 11
0 29 1 8086 24D4 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 9
0 29 2 8086 24D7 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 5
0 29 3 8086 24DE 1458 24D2 0C03 USB 1.1 Host Cntrlr 11
0 29 7 8086 24DD 1458 5006 0C03 USB 2.0 Host Cntrlr 5
0 31 1 8086 24DB 1458 24D2 0101 IDE Cntrlr 14
0 31 2 8086 24D1 1458 24DF 0101 Native IDE Cntrlr 5
0 31 3 8086 24D3 1458 24D2 0C05 SMBus Cntrlr 10
0 31 5 8086 24D5 1458 A002 0401 Multimedia Device 10
1 0 0 1002 4E45 1002 0002 0300 Display Cntrlr 11
2 1 0 8086 1019 8086 1019 0200 Network Cntrlr 5
3 10 0 104C 8024 0000 0000 0C00 IEEE 1394 Host Cntrlr 11
3 11 0 1095 3112 1095 3112 0180 Mass Storage Cntrlr 9
3 12 0 1283 8212 1283 0001 0104 RAID Cntrlr 10
ACPI Controller 9
FreeBSD 4.8-20030810-STABLE (the most recent stable snapshot I could
find) seems to have drivers for the "native mode" PCI parallel and
serial ATA controllers on the ICH5R chip, the USB controllers on the
ICH5R chip, the Intel 82547EI ethernet chip, and the TI TSB43AB23
firewire chip. FreeBSD 4.8-20030810-STABLE does not seem to have
drivers for either of the raid chips or the audio chip and it
describes the USB ports as version 1.0 rather than 2.0.
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE has similar support. FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE lacks
some of the drivers found in the newer releases (I forget which).
Summary: FreeBSD-stable and FreeBSD-5.1 support for the new motherboards
looks good enough to start with, but I would sure like to have support
for the audio chip (so I don't have to use up a PCI slot for an audio
card) and being able to attach more ATA drives to the motherboard might
be very useful. There is some hope: the audio system claims to be AC97
compatible and there is a Linux driver for the ITE 8212 raid chip.
Dan Strick
strick@covad.net
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