On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, Mike A. Harris wrote:
<snip>
> After the problems I experienced though, I wondered just how many
> problems would I be in for if I bought a brand new Athlon 800
> system? Would it run like a P100 due to lack of Linux hardware
> support? After reading stuff on lkml here, I'm starting to think
> that such an upgrade would be a waste of money until maybe 2.4.10
> or so.
>
> So the question is basically: Is the upgrade worthwhile? Is
> 2.2.x or 2.4.x compatible with Athlon CPU's or are there problems
> at all still? What about Athlon motherboards and chipset
> hardware? Can I expect the IDE chipset to work? Applying IDE
> patches is ok, but I just want to know that I'm going to get more
> than 10M/s out of the drives, and not fry them. Those are my
> main concerns, but I'd just like to know what the average
> developer thinks of the idea of forking out cash for a highend
> system right now and wether or not it is worth it yet.
>
> If not, I'd rather wait until things are integrated with the
> kernel proper and working. If it *IS* ready now, what sort of
> Athlon hardware is recommended for a developmental machine?
I have been using a Asus K7M motherboard for a while, and I have nothing
but positive things to say about athlons. Both Linux 2.2.x and 2.4test
works perfectly (in 2.2.x I can't get the IDE drives above UDMA33 mode,
but my IDE drives does only about 24-25mB/s anyhows so it's not really a
concern)
The IDE code fallbacks on PIO by default using this IDE chipset (VIA) in
2.2.x, but can be set to UDMA33 with the -X and -d option to hdparm.
My setup here at home is a Asus K7M mobo, 700Mhz Athlon, 512MB PC133 CAS 2
SDRAM, a Tekram 390U3W dual channel u160scsi card (guys - I need a 2.2.17
driver for this baby, LSI/Symbios 53C1010-33 chip), and a g400 max dual
head (which is by the way a great card for XFree use).
This motherboard is one of the first athlon-boards around, so it only runs
the RAM at 100Mhz, uses a slot A instead of the socket A, lacks the latest
chipset improvements and supports at most UDMA66. I can't speak of newer
athlon motherboards - because I havn't tested any else yet. This baby will
do for a while :-)
-- Andre Tomt andre@tomt.net- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 15 2000 - 21:00:11 EST