hw-compatibility: 780g and s-ata controllers

[bell]

hi,

I'm planning on building a home-NAS (preferrably with opensolaris and zfs), and the AMD 780g chipset looks perfect to me. In addition an s-ata controller is a must-have. I have tried to see if there is any support in opensolaris for 780g, and failed. (No conclusive answer, but most likely there is no support at the moment).

I have not been able to find conclusive results regarding opensolaris and cheap S-ATA controllers either, all I know is that there has been success with some SiL3114 controllers if you flash the bios of the controller with the "non-SATARAID bios":

http://blogs.sun.com/PlasticPixel/entry/build_your_own_multi_terabyte

Any help regarding support is very appreciated

I would like to run a Phenom CPU on a mobo with built-in gfx/vga, preferrably in micro-atx form factor, and need a 4-port s-ata controller. Any mobo will do, but if there is support for the 780g that would be best. Anyone know what the "support situation" on opensolaris is?

[bell]

Due to a motherboard-failure on my linux-server, I had to buy a new motherboard. Since the response to my question has been far from enlightening, I decided to take action myself and bought a 780g as a replacement motherboard. (Asus M3A-H/HDMI, AMD 780G+SB700, ATX). It looks OK, but nothing more, not the motherboard I would have bought if it were not for the fact that I want to test the 780g.

I booted the kubuntu 8.04 amd64 live cd fine. I did not manage to boot ubuntu 7.04 64bit server (which is currently installed), probably due to missing drivers for the chipset.

I also tested booting with the BeleniX 0.7 live CD (32bit), which apparantly work ok. I managed to mount one of my local drives, although the "mount-application" hung when I tried to mount drive nr 2. And then things suddenly went down the drain. The entire system was behaving very odd, and started complaining about no space left on device. It was getting very late, and I did not experiment any more. I'll try to install build 89 of opensolaris during the weekend and see how that goes.

[bridgman]

I think the most recent OpenSolaris builds include the radeonhd driver, but the version included is probably not quite new enough to work on 780G.

Official radeonhd support for 780 is still in a side branch (Egbert's personal repo visible on freedesktop.org) but I expect it will be merged into master over the next week so pulling down the latest code next week should go a long way to getting you running.

It's a holiday in Germany; Egbert thought it would be rude to push a bunch of changes and not be around in case something broke

[bell]

The graphics worked on belenix, although I've not tested 3D. I've also discovered why everything "went down the drain". 4 of my 6GB of RAM was bonkers. (Probably due to the mobo failure). I did unfortunately not have the time to install opensolaris over the weekend, but will give it a try in the near future, and let you know how it goes.

(I wholeheartedly agree on being around when pushing a bunch of changes, a wise man )

[bridgman]

FYI we don't have 3D support on 780 or HD2xxx yet but it shouldn't be long. The 6xx-family acceleration docs are kinda huge so they're taking a long time to finish and release, but the driver changes shouldn't be as big as the documentation.

[bell]

FYI we don't have 3D support on 780 or HD2xxx yet but it shouldn't be long. The 6xx-family acceleration docs are kinda huge so they're taking a long time to finish and release, but the driver changes shouldn't be as big as the documentation.

Ah, sorry, I didn't read the HD-part of your previous reply. I was planning on using the motherboard on a server since it is the cheapest mobo with both AM2+ and internal gfx, so 3D is not really necessary for my part. At the moment. If I am pleased with opensolaris, I may perhaps go for an opensolaris solution for my workstation in the future, and the 3d would definitely be beneficial.

Thanks for the clarification

[npcomplete]

I'd recommend a board that has ECC memory support, as Solaris can detect ECC errors and warn of degrading dimms on AMD64 cpus.

If you're looking just for 4 SATA ports, then I'd just stick with an onboard MB controller. If it doesn't work in AHCI mode, it should work in IDE mode. No "raid" mode. For add-on cards, these chips are supported:

- Silicon Image 3112, 3114, 3124, 3132
the SIL 3132 is a 2 port SATA-II chip, pci-e x1.
the SIL 3124 is a 4 port SATA-II chip, natively pci-x, but also come in 32-bit pci form (highly recommended over the 3112, 3114).
also a few 3124 cards in pci-e form using a pcix-to-pcie bridge internally.
Most cards using these SI chips can be flashed with a non-raid bios from Silicon Image if they are advertised with "RAID".

- Marvell 88sxNNNN 4 and 8 port pci-x (best value; 8 ports for $100), and the 8 port pcie version i think

- nearly all LSI-logic

.. if you want onboard out-of-the-box fully accelerated video, you'd have to stick with Nvidia for now (or Intel for intel cpus).