Quite a bit of recent hardware, when used with FreeBSD, has various issues (ACPI problems, unsupported peripherals, and so on) that make using this hardware less than ideal. In this page i report some notes on the compatibility of various hardware with FreeBSD.
Recently tested a Sony VAIO PCG-61714M with FreeBSD. The machine has the following hardware: - wired network: alc (Atheros 1 Gbit/s) - wireless: ar9485 (Atheros, currently unsupported) - memory: 4 GBytes - HDD: 2.5in SATA - video: ATI HD6400m (only Vesa, does not work with radeonhd, apparently needs some extra support) - the keyboard base is very soft Diskless and USB boot must be enabled in the bios with F2 The PC-BSD install at first fails to find 'alc', had to manually load and configure the device. Similarly, for some reason the HD was not found. The installer apparently does not let me partition the disk hence resorted on a full install. The trackpad with the default Xorg does not support multitap. Battery status not detected. acpiconf -i batt reports bogus values. Suspend trashes the disk (perhaps it looks for a suspend partition ?) SUSPEND: lid switch not working. For linux they suggest GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_sleep=nonvs" http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=12026604
In addition to the VGA port, the board as a jumper-selected DVI-D or HDMI output. The VGA is considered the primary interface, where all the boot messages are shown if connected. Messages show up on the DVI port only if the VGA is not connected (something to keep in mind if you want to connect it to two screens).
I am extremely happy with this motherboard and an Athlon BE-2400 CPU, which is a dual-core that only consumes 45 Watts of power and so is very cool (and silent).
This motherboard is inexpensive (57 Euro incl.VAT), is based on an nVidia chipset, supports the Athlon AM2 CPUs and is rich of peripherals. It features 4 memory slots (up to 8GB); 2 PCI, 1 PCI-E x16, 1 PCI-E x1 slots; 4 SATA, 1 IDE (2 device), 1 floppy interfaces; 1 COM, 1 LPT, 8 USB ports; HDA audio ('snd_hda' driver, both play and rec supported); integrated 10/100/1000 ethernet ('nfe' driver on FreeBSD); integrated video with VGA and DVI output (requires the x11/nvidia-driver port).
So far I have had very good experience with this board. FreeBSD 7 installation is straightforward (using the 'nfe' and 'snd_hda' drivers for network and audio, the x11/nvidia-driver port for the graphics card under xorg, even dual head configurations are working with this xorg.conf file. Remember that the nvidia.ko module must be loaded before ACPI, so you need to put nvidia_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf (to make sure it is loaded before acpi) and put 'Driver "nvidia"' in xorg.conf. This allows full-screen operation in mplayer.
The motherboard does not come with cables for the COM and LPT headers, but this is not a major problem.
A backport of the 'nfe' driver to FreeBSD 6.3 is trivial.
WARNING: under heavy network load,
the 'nfe' driver has a tendency to stall on this hardware, on all
versions of FreeBSD you might need
this patch to let it work reliably.
This motherboard is also inexpensive (51 Euro), and is based on an nvidia chipset. Features 2 memory, 2 PCI, 1 PCI-E x16 slots, 2 SATA, 1 IDE, 1 floppy, 1 COM, 1 LPT, 8 USB ports, audio, integrated 10/100 ethernet ('nfe' driver on FreeBSD), integrated video (requires proprietary nvidia driver for good support under xfree).
The 'nfe' driver is only present on FreeBSD 7.x and above, which is a slight annoyance because of the pityful status of Firefox on 7.x. The standard 'nv' driver in Xorg is unable to drive a 1680x1050 monitor, however this can be fixed using the x11/nvidia-driver port. Remember that the driver must be loaded before ACPI, so you need to put nvidia_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf (to make sure it is loaded before acpi) and put 'Driver "nvidia"' in xorg.conf. This allows full-screen operation in mplayer.
Audio output is supported by the 'snd_hda' driver, audio input is also working
cat /dev/sndstat FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm) Installed devices: pcm0:at memory 0xdfef8000 irq 23 kld snd_hda [20071129_0050] (1p/1r/1v channels duplex default) Mixer vol is currently set to 100:100 Mixer pcm is currently set to 100:100 Mixer line is currently set to 75:75 Mixer mic is currently set to 0:0 Mixer rec is currently set to 100:100 Recording source: mic pci bus 0x0000 cardnum 0x07 function 0x00: vendor 0x10de device 0x03ef nVidia Corporation MCP61 Ethernet pci bus 0x0000 cardnum 0x0d function 0x00: vendor 0x10de device 0x03d0 nVidia Corporation GeForce 6100 nForce 430
If you have to buy a new board, the ASUS M2N-VM DVI is a much better value for money. For an extra 6-8 Euros you get a Gig-E port, a DVI port with dual head capability, extra PCI-X, memory, SATA ports.
While cheap and rich of peripherals, the board has a number of problems with FreeBSD (and some Linux versions as well) essentially due, I believe, to the ACPI info not being recognised. This prevents the sustem from running with SMP enabled (you need to boot the kernel in 'SAFE' mode ). Basic activities can then proceed, even X11 works with the 'radeonhw' driver, but the audio driver (snd_hda) panics the box. No bios updates are available on the vendor site, so there is no easy fix for the time being.
Other comments:
This is a PCI video acquisition board (analog+DVB). devinfo reports the following
saa0 pnpinfo vendor=0x1131 device=0x7133 subvendor=0x1043 subdevice=0x4876 class=0x048000 at slot=6 function=0
iicbus0
ic0
iic0
iicsmb0
ds16720
ad74180
The 'saa' driver (part of kbtv) attaches to the card but at least
the tuner is not supported, and same for the 'dvb' part.
Linux has a probably suitable driver that should be ported.
One difficulty with this kind of boards is that they need to load
some firmware before the tuner/dvb parts are accessible.
[SAA7134_BOARD_ASUSTeK_P7131_HYBRID_LNA] = {
.name = "ASUSTeK P7131 Hybrid",
.audio_clock = 0x00187de7,
.tuner_type = TUNER_PHILIPS_TDA8290,
.radio_type = UNSET,
.tuner_addr = ADDR_UNSET,
.radio_addr = ADDR_UNSET,
.tuner_config = 2,
.gpiomask = 1 << 21,
.mpeg = SAA7134_MPEG_DVB,
.inputs = {{
.name = name_tv,
.vmux = 1,
.amux = TV,
.tv = 1,
.gpio = 0x0000000,
},{
.name = name_comp1,
.vmux = 3,
.amux = LINE2,
.gpio = 0x0200000,
},{
.name = name_comp2,
.vmux = 0,
.amux = LINE2,
.gpio = 0x0200000,
},{
.name = name_svideo,
.vmux = 8,
.amux = LINE2,
.gpio = 0x0200000,
}},
.radio = {
.name = name_radio,
.amux = TV,
.gpio = 0x0200000,
},
{
.vendor = PCI_VENDOR_ID_PHILIPS,
.device = PCI_DEVICE_ID_PHILIPS_SAA7133,
.subvendor = 0x1043,
.subdevice = 0x4876,
.driver_data = SAA7134_BOARD_ASUSTeK_P7131_HYBRID_LNA,
},{
mount -t msdos /dev/da0 completes but then accessing the data fails with various errors like
kernel: umass0: Invalid CSW: tag 570 should be 572mtools is however able to read and write correctly on the device.
root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x0603 product 0xb5d3 bus uhub1 kernel: umass0:NOT WORKING YET: EasyCAP 4 channel capture card (2009.02.15)on uhub1 kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0 kernel: da0: Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device kernel: da0: 40.000MB/s transfers kernel: da0: 1951MB (3995648 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 248C) kernel: cd1 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 1 kernel: cd1: Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device kernel: cd1: 40.000MB/s transfers kernel: cd1: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present
This is a 4 channel analog video acquisition board
root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x05e1 product 0x0408 bus uhub4 kernel: ugen0:some reports say the stk11xx driver on linux shuold support it.on uhub4