If you want evidence that hardware monopolies are harmful and that Intel sucks, look no further than DMA. Intel is ugly, Sparc and Alpha were not. The destruction of Alpha is a textbook example of anti-competitive practice which could have given you cheap 64 bit computing a decade ago and working DMA support along with it. Itanium still does not do as well.
In my limited experience, buggy DMA is more than a Via issue. It's funny you should mention Dell. Two of the three Dells I tried out last weekend needed "nodma" boot parameters to boot. This might be an IDE only issue, but all of the computers were more than three years old. I've only had problems like that with VIA when the chipset is less than a year old. The Dell I did take home did not work with the bt848 / Philips tuner capture card I tried to put in it. Though I have not tried to put it in any other machine yet, I imagine it will work as the chipset is well supported. Thanks for bringing up DMA issues. They have never really bothered me, but I know they are out there and I should know more. Wiki was a nice place to start. They point to a very informative OReily publication that I don't have enough time to read right now but that's worth sharing: http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/ch13.html DMA in the PC world looks nasty, at least of 2.4. It's all very hardware dependent, the hardware does not implement specs and none of it is easily abstracted. Intel and many other common hardware platforms lack mapping registers, so PCI DMA on them is not fully supported. I don't know if newer IA, such as 586, 686 or AMD have gotten around this problem but the root of the rot is Intel. On Thursday 14 July 2005 11:29 pm, Jason Lanclos wrote: > I haven't had any issue's with AMD.. however.. I've had several issues > related to VIA chipsets.. Most of these are caused by VIA's issues with DMA > latency. > >... Supposedly there is a VIA latency patch for windows.. but I > haven't found one for Linux that actually works.. > So right now my PVR-500 is in my Dell workstation and its setup as a MythTV > slave backend. > >
