Tim S staggered into the Black Sun and said:
> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>> For AMD systems your best bet is an Nvidia Nforce based motherboards.
>> The Nforce chipsets work flawlessly with Linux.
> Just out of interest (and I'm out of date here) do they work
> flawlessly with a vanilla kernel (ie not binary blobs from NVidia)?

nForce doesn't necessarily mean "nVidia chipset graphics card".
Everything works on my nForce-based Tyan S2865 board with a vanilla
2.6.20.1 kernel, though for some reason forcedeth says the onboard
Ethernet port is eth3 instead of eth1.

--
So, what do *you* do for a living?
I sit in a chair, pressing small plastic rectangles with my fingers
while peering at many tiny, colored dots. --Peter Manders
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

Dances With Crows wrote:

> Tim S staggered into the Black Sun and said:
>> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>>> For AMD systems your best bet is an Nvidia Nforce based motherboards.
>>> The Nforce chipsets work flawlessly with Linux.
>> Just out of interest (and I'm out of date here) do they work
>> flawlessly with a vanilla kernel (ie not binary blobs from NVidia)?
>
> nForce doesn't necessarily mean "nVidia chipset graphics card".

Yep. Though I remember the days before forcedeth when binary crap was
required.

> Everything works on my nForce-based Tyan S2865 board with a vanilla
> 2.6.20.1 kernel, though for some reason forcedeth says the onboard
> Ethernet port is eth3 instead of eth1.
>

That is interesting - perhaps I will forgive NForce for existing and give
one a go.

Thanks for that.

Cheers

Tim

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:46:36 +0100, Tim S wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>
>
>> For AMD systems your best bet is an Nvidia Nforce based motherboards.
>> The Nforce chipsets work flawlessly with Linux. As someone else
>> suggested always check the customer reviews on Newegg before buying a
>> motherboard. If you don't see any mention of Linux in the reviews look
>> at a different board.
>
> Hi
>
> Just out of interest (and I'm out of date here) do they work flawlessly
> with a vanilla kernel (ie not binary blobs from NVidia)?
>
> Cheers
>
>
> Tim

I have several Nforce systems of various flavors, they've all worked out
of the box with no binary drivers required. I'm not sure what the Nforce
binary drivers actually do for you, I've never noticed any performance
difference between the kernel drivers and Nvidia's, the disk performance
seems to be the same and Ethernet performance seems to be about as good
as it can be with the open source drivers. NVidia did have some hardware
firewall support in the Nforce 4 (since dropped in the Nforce5), I
suppose that the binary drivers may have taken advantage of that. It's
certainly not like the graphics drivers, the Nvidia binary drivers make a
big difference vs the open source driver.