Intel SE7520BD2 motherboard
Hello! Some friends of mine are looking to buy a new server hardware based on Intel SE7520BD2 motherboard for their FreeBSD server (6.0 or whatever is the latest release in a month or two). The plan is to use two mirrored SCSI disks as main storage and one (S)ATA disk for backups. Two LAN connections are necessary. I've been trying to figure out how well all the integrated features of this motherboard are supported by FreeBSD. So far, these are my findings - SCSI/RAID controller: LSI1030 - explicitly noted in hardware notes, also I'm running one of these with FreeBSD 5.4 right now so this should be OK; - First integrated NIC: Intel 82541PI - explicitly noted in hardware notes, so should be OK; - Second integrated NIC: Marvell Yukon EC88E8050 - nothing about this in hardware notes, but a binary FreeBSD 6 driver can be downloaded from Marvell's website. I have no experience using third-party binary drivers with FreeBSD, so I'm a bit hesitant here. If I get this driver working with FreeBSD 6.0, can I expect it to still work with 6.1, 6.2, etc? Given the usual warnings how kernel and userland must be kept in sync when upgrading, I think this is even more true about kernel and modules. Am I possibly commiting myself to running an outdated 6.x release by using this third-party binary driver? - Intel ICH5R SATA controller. Also not explicitly noted in hardware notes, at least not in 'Disk controllers' section. Couldn't find anything definitive by googling. I'm not interested in possible RAID features, would it work if I just connected a single SATA disk to this controller? Overall, would you recommend this motherboard for running FreeBSD 6? Thanks in advance for any feedback. -- Toomas Aas ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Intel SE7520BD2 motherboard
- Second integrated NIC: Marvell Yukon EC88E8050 - nothing about this .. we're using the same driver (from marvell directly) under 6.1-RC2 and it works smoothly. you only have to cp if_myk.ko to your kernel dir, and load it with loader.conf or later on with kldload... (we have an intel SE7320VP2D2 board, should be exactly the same chipset from marvell). take care for the following issue: intel has some ipmi-remote-lan-console stuff, which configures an ip address and sends arp-requests if you activate it or not. there are non-public ipmi-tools available from intel support, if you encounter such behaviour. - Intel ICH5R SATA controller. Also not explicitly noted in hardware notes, at least not in 'Disk controllers' section. Couldn't find anything definitive by googling. I'm not interested in possible RAID features, would it work if I just connected a single SATA disk to this controller? it's not really supported, but you can use atacontrol to write good metadata (again, thx 2 soren ;-)) and get this thing running (sw-raid). we have an ICH6R inside of a hp dl320 g4, works well, except pulling hdd's and replacing them while being up, will render the new disk unknown until a reboot has occurred (raid sync has to be done manually, but works). our board works fine (except a current issue with a malloc-panic, but i'm sure that's an issue of configuration, not supported hardware ;-) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
