On Tue, 2 May 2000, Richard Ingram wrote:
> I have had no trouble from my Tyan board, I got a S1668 ATX Dual PPro
> board, oh must be 3 or 4 years ago now, runs at least 12-14hrs a day,
> overnight 100% load in NT (yeah I know I am moving everything to Linux
> as we speak) doing Seti@Home - soon to be 100% Linux when I reconfig my
> machine to be my home server/network gateway.
>
> Tyan quality is excellent in my view.
It looks like their quality of hardware is great but their BIOSes suck.
Unfortunately, BIOS is used for initial startup, before Linux is loaded,
and their BIOS bugs limit Linux features. For example their MP tables
report IRQs in a way that prevents PCI IRQs from being mapped to
IRQ[19:16]. As a result you lose four ISA interrupts. With four PCI and
five ISA slots on a particular board this used to be a real showstopper
for some configurations.
I reported this and some other problems to Tyan's tech support but got no
response and, of course, no bug-fix release of BIOS was made available
either. Things might have changed since then as I refer to a dual-Pentium
board I got two years ago but I wouldn't bet on it. So be careful with
Tyan.
--
+ Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland +
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+ e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED], PGP key available +
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