Re: [OT] Asus A7M266 motherboard and Debian
> Would you prefer these motherboards to the more recent ones from the point
> of view of stability under Linux?
No... I always try to get information on the spcific motherboard I'm
buying. And I don't trust a strong vendor name (like "Asus"); I instead
try to find the chipsets they used, check if they have problems, and
then I'll see if the vendor has traditionally done a good job
integrating the chipsets in the motherboard (it doesn't matter if you're
a great engineer if you're using crappy bricks or cement).
> I'm thinking for example of the Asus
> A7V266 and the A7V333, I think the former has the KT266A chipset, and the
> latter the KT333 chipset, both from VIA? My impression is that the more
> recent Athlon motherhoards have more dodgy support in general (needing to
> patch kernels etc,) which I don't want to get into.
Well, I didn't have to patch my kernel, so no problems there.
I think yes, new chipsets may take a while until the kernel works fine
with them, but that's usually a short time.
Hm, now that I think of it... I did patch my kernels, as I've been doing
for a long time -- the kernel has one little problem with VIA chipsets
in general (the system timer counter (i8253) should be reprogrammed in
certain cases otherwise it may be reset to a wrong value, causing weird
things to happen: gettimeofday() would return absurd values, and you'd
have roblems with X blanking all the time, squid closing connections,
etc).
I think only the 2.4 still have the problem (the fix was introduced some
time ago, but then it was removed for some reason that I don't
remember).
> Ok. I'm just wondering in that case why it is referred to as an AMD 761
> chipset. Would it not be more accurate to call it a AMD761/VIA 686b
> chipset? Is it just because the north bridge is more important? Thanks for
> replying.
I don't think it's more important. Really. See, if you get a buggy
chipset, or if the kernel UDMA driver for that chipset has bugs, you
have a problem... I agree that it should be called AMD761/VIA686b.
J.
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