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From: bvickers@rumba.ics.uci.edu (Brett J. Vickers)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: PCI Hardware for FreeBSD: Summary of responses
Date: 12 Jul 1994 14:46:41 -0700
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Lines: 111
Message-ID: <2vv302$pf@rumba.ics.uci.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rumba.ics.uci.edu
The following is the set of responses I received regarding PCI
hardware and suspected FreeBSD compatibility.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: michaelv@iastate.edu
In comp.os.386bsd.questions you write:
>I, like a number of other people, am looking into the purchase of a
>PCI motherboard. However, before I get one, I'd like to know what
>kind of PCI peripheral cards are known to work well with FreeBSD (and
>Xfree86). Specifically, I'm looking for the best PCI SCSI controllers
>and video cards. Does anyone have any recommendations?
SCSI controller:
BusLogic bt946c. Read the hundreds of other posts in this newsgroup
on this same subject for more info.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stefan Esser <se@mi.uni-koeln.de>
In article <2uslfj$sak@lambada.ics.uci.edu>, you write:
|> I, like a number of other people, am looking into the purchase of a
|> PCI motherboard. However, before I get one, I'd like to know what
|> kind of PCI peripheral cards are known to work well with FreeBSD (and
|> Xfree86). Specifically, I'm looking for the best PCI SCSI controllers
|> and video cards. Does anyone have any recommendations?
|>
|> If enough recommendations are sent to me via email, I will post a
|> summary.
The ASUS-486/PCI works just fine under FreeBSD. It has a very fast onboard
PCI SCSI controller chip (which gets 3MB/s read and write performance
through the file system on a 70% full ST31200N ...).
It comes with all the standard PC peripherals (FIFO serial ports, IDE,
...). CPUs supported are 486DX and DX2 up to 66MHz. Don't know about
a version for the 486DX4. There are Pentium motherboards from the same
company, but I only know about one that doesn't offer PCI ...
The price is low if you take the onboard features into account (some
DM 600,-- without CPU, that is <$400 at an exchange rate of 1.6).
Only drawback is the write-through cache, but as far as I know, most
current PCI 486 boards don't offer write back ... (and if they do, they
lack write posting, which is very important for PCI performance).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Urban Boquist <boquist@cs.chalmers.se>
We have just bought a couple of P60 PCI systems with Buslogic 964c
SCSI and ATI GUP video card, both PCI. The machines work very well
with NetBSD-current.
-- Urban
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Chris Ficklin <cseanf@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
Final drivers for the NCR 53c810 chip is almost if not already out.
X drivers for the s3 864/964 chips are in the works. #9 GXE64 &
GXE64 Pro use these chips I would recomend a little bit of patience
and then buying this combination.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Strandenaes <thostr@autotelia.isv.uit.no>
Hi. I'm also into buying PCI-stuff nowadays, and would like to get a
copy of whatever useful tips receive. The hottest tip is ofcourse to
stay away from the earlier Saturn chipsets - they are darn slow and
also buggy. Version 3 should be okay, though. Also, and that's really
why I'm going to buy one, get a card with the NCR scsi-chip integrated.
Throughput is good, and support for *BSD and Linux is being developed.
As for video-card, you should consider one of the new S3-cards now seeing
the daylight - the 864/964 chips. Saw one benched at 184 xstones, which
beats the living daylights out of a HP 9000/720 for price/performance.
Remember to buy an AMD chip, and get hold of one of those fancy stickers
saying 'Intel outside'. Run FreeBSD or Linux.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jim Chuang <chuangjm@bluenose.na.tuns.ca>
I have a Pentium-90 PCI-ISA system running FreeBSD-1.1.5 very well.
The configuration of my system is as follows:
1. cpu : Pentium-90
2. motherboard : PCI54PV (Probably made in Taiwan)
3. memory : 96 MB
4. SCSI Controller: PCI-SCSI SP-810 (Probably made in Taiwan as well :-) )
Note: At this moment, FreeBSD does not support the driver for this kind
of PCI-SCSI controller. I got the driver from wolf@dentaro.gun.de
and it works quite (in fact, very very) good.
5. SCSI driver : quantum 1080_s (1 GB)
6. Vedio Adaptor : ATI Mach32 PCI Accelerator
(It runs XFree86 happily.)
7. CD-ROM : NEC triple spin SCSI model
(sorry, I forget the model number)
8. Monitor : Viewsonic 21"
--
Brett J. Vickers
bvickers@ics.uci.edu
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bvickers/home.html