At 09:49 24/08/2004 -0500, you wrote:
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 20:19:49 +1000 Paul Gear <paul@gear.dyndns.org> wrote: > Michael Rumpf wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I'm about to buy a new motherboard. Can anyone recommend a board > > that is known to work well with free software drivers. I just don't > > want to buy another board and find myself disabling most of the > > features as they don't work under Linux. > > I don't have a recommendation, but i can disrecommend the NVIDIA > nForce2 chipset from a free software perspective. The NIC has a > closed source driver. When i emailed them about it, the response was, > "Our networking performance is too important to allow competitors to > use our drivers." I disabled the on-board NIC and bought a $20 > RTL-8139. :-) Fortunately you don't have to wait on them if you still want to use it though. The forcedeth module in kernels 2.4.21(might be .24 instead) and greater works great with their onboard NIC. People might still want to avoid them because of their proprietary policies, but at least those that already have them don't have to live with a useless ethernet card. Jacob
I have to say that although I don't approve of the closed source nature of the nForce drivers, the boards seem to be exceptionally good performers under both windows and linux. The open source drivers seem to be fairly on a par with the closed ones, at least under linux, in terms of performance.
Disclaimer: I don't own or use an nForce2 motherboard, and am going entirely on hearsay. I read the MythTV mailing list alot, and (at least as far as AMD goes) people seem to have much less troubles with nVidia chipsets than with VIA's bug-du-jour's (Myth is very heavy on the DMA, and the ivtv web pages are full of warnings about certain VIA chipsets). And to disprove my own point, I have a Myth box that's been running pretty well on a VIA KM400 for a while now. I've also got linux on one of the much maligned KT400's, although I've never really tried to thrash that one.
SiS chipsets seem to play quite nice as well, but their problem is they're always put on utterly pants mobos, which has the same effect as if the chipset was rubbish anyway.
If I was going to buy a new SktA mobo, I'd probably plump for the nvidia. Even if they don't have OSS drivers, their hardware seems pretty solid with the open source ones (again, hearsay). As it is, the next mobo I get will have once of AMD's 8000 chipsets in it (dual opteron, wooooh!), which are always seem to be excellently supported under Linux (totally open spec IIRC) to the extent that I've never had any serious problems with the 76x series chipsets (on six different motherboards). That said, they're abysmal performers compared to modern Athlon chipsets like the nForce2.