On Nov 6, 2013, at 12:36 AM, Thinker Rix <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi all! > > I am planing to set up a new pfSense server with brand new hardware. > The motherboards that I am thinking of have socket LGA1155 or LGA1150 and > come with Intel C204 and C222 chipsets, respectively. > > The motherboard producer provides a compatibility list for his boards. He > states that the: > - C204 board is compatible with FreeBSD 8.1 > - C222 board is compatible with FreeBSD 9.1 > > I know only very little about FreeBSD, but I think that hardware support is > quite similar with the Linux kernel: what once has been added to the kernel, > stays there "forever", istn't it? So if the vendor writes "compatible with > FreeBSD 8.1" it continues to be compatible with all following versions, such > as FreeBSD 8.3, correct? That's largely accurate, but not a cast-iron guarantee. Like all open-source projects, support depends upon volunteers and so how supported a piece of hardware is depends upon the availability of maintainers. So, there's a possibility that support may erode over time. Certain architectural milestones may also affect hardware support. For example, when there was the big push to eliminate the GIANT lock, there was a "step up or get dropped" challenge issued against a lot of drivers in the tree. Some that were bit-rotting and had nobody step up to make them GIANT-free got dropped and hence became unsupported. There's also the law of diminishing returns. Somewhere in the FreeBSD 4.x cycle support was dropped for an ancient and obscure CD-ROM device I was using. Although it was personally inconvenient at the time, it was understandable as the device was way beyond legacy even back then. (It also doesn't help when developers can't get hardware to test drivers against.) In a similar vein, at FreeBSD 5.0 they dropped support for i386 CPUs (from then on you needed at least an i486 and up at that point---i.e., a CPU that had hardware FP support). > If those figures that the hardware producer provided are correct, it would > mean that I could run pfSense 2.1 only on the C204 board, since pfSense 2.1 > is based on FreeBSD 8.3, and the C222 board is only compatible from FreeBSD > 9.1 and upwards, right?! > > Since hardware producers tend to not edit and update such compatibility lists > properly, the information provided there could be wrong. For this reason I > would like to double-check. Could maybe someone give me a hint where I could > look up, which chipsets FreeBSD supports and from what version on? A good place to look is in the "Hardware Notes" that accompanies each release. For example, for 8.3 is is at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.3R/hardware.html and for 9.1 it is at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/hardware.html. Also, if you have a specific piece of hardware in mind, a good place to ask is the [email protected] mailing list. (You don't need to subscribe there to post.) There's a good chance that someone who has the hardware or is familiar with it could post whether it works well or not. Cheers, Paul. _______________________________________________ List mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
