On Thursday 24 March 2005 7:16am, Oliver Korpilla wrote: > > I hate this &$%?!@ board!!! (I've overlooked the fact that ATI made not > only the onboard graphics but the chipset as well!) Nothing works as > intended... > > If MSI or ATI would be so kind to give me some documentation so I could fix > this mess myself... But MSI does not feel responsible, and ATI failed to > react. Their fglrx driver for x86_64 even fails to compile - and I guess > this is what they meant with "This board supports Linux" ...
I sympathize for you Oliver. Its frustrating to the extreme to get hardware that works fine for Windows but doesn't work well under any other operating system because the manufacturer simply doesn't care. ATI's dismal record with video drivers for Linux suggests to me that they wouldn't be much better when supporting their mobo chipset under Linux either. They're just fine if you're only going to run Windows on your machine, but I would stay away from them until their Linux reputation improves. I've heard better things about Nvidia, but I don't use their mobo chipset, only one of their separate graphics boards, so I can't speak to their mobo chipset. I'm using an older MSI Neo board using VIA chipsets, and it works exceedingly well under Linux. Everything I have is recognized including SMBus, ACPI, and Ethernet. However, I don't use SATA, so I can't speak to that. When you replace your current motherboard I suggest looking at a VIA-based MSI board. I have a suspicion that MSI and VIA, both being Taiwan companies, are together able to make a better mobo than MSI working with a foreign company. MSI has been making VIA-based boards for a long time, and no one else has yet produced a mobo with the equivalent of MSI's Corecell technology, AFAIK. The only downside is of course not having built-in graphics on the mobo, I've always preferred a separate video card, but YMMV. Your timing/clock problems are however more widespread. I have related problems too with spurious messages about lost timer ticks. They all appear to stem from problems with the kernel's ACPI driver and/or the kernel not handling a changing CPU clock speed well (this happens to me precisely because I've got the Corecell activated on the mobo and its dynamically changing the CPU speed based on load). I've seen one conversation on lkml about it, and it appears to be a "work-in-progress" problem, that will eventually be solved within the kernel itself. Whatever you do, do not buy a mobo unless you know ACPI works correctly under Linux (for modern AMD64 mobos, ACPI appears to have become very important), or buy from some vendor with a return policy. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]