Hi, thank you so much for this post. This is exactly what I was looking for. I've been eyeing the M3A76-CM board, but will now look at 78 and M4A as well.
Actually, not that many Asus M3A, let alone M4A boards show up yet on the OpenSolaris HCL, so I'd like to encourage everyone to share their hardware experience by clicking on the "submit hardware" link on: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/os/ I've done it a couple of times and it's really just a matter of 5-10 minutes where you can help others know if a certain component works or not or if a special driver or /etc/driver_aliases setting is required. I'm also interested in getting the power down. Right now, I have the Athlon X2 5050e (45W TDP) on my list, but I'd also like to know more about the possibilities of the Athlon II X2 250 and whether it has better potential for power savings. Neal, the M3A78 seems to have a RealTek RTL8111/8168B NIC chip. I pulled this off a Gentoo Wiki, because strangely this information doesn't show up on the Asus website. Also, thanks for the CF to pata hint for the root pool mirror. Will try to find fast CFs to boot from. The performance problems you see when writing may be related to master/slave issues, but I'm not a good PC tweaker to back that up. Cheers, Constantin F. Wessels wrote:
Hi, I'm using asus m3a78 boards (with the sb700) for opensolaris and m2a* boards (with the sb600) for linux some of them with 4*1GB and others with 4*2Gb ECC memory. Ecc faults will be detected and reported. I tested it with a small tungsten light. By moving the light source slowly towards the memory banks you'll heat them up in a controlled way and at a certain point bit flips will occur. I recommend you to go for a m4a board since they support up to 16 GB. I don't know if you can run opensolaris without a videocard after installation I think you can disable the "halt on no video card" in the bios. But Simon Breden had some trouble with it, see his homeserver blog. But you can go for one of the three m4a boards with a 780g onboard. Those will give you 2 pci-e x16 connectors. I don't think the onboard nic is supported. I always put an intel (e1000) in, just to prevent any trouble. I don't have any trouble with the sb700 in ahci mode. Hotplugging works like a charm. Transfering a couple of GB's over esata takes considerable less time than via usb. I have a pata to dual cf adapter and two industrial 16gb cf cards as mirrored root pool. It takes for ever to install nevada, at least 14 hours. I suspect the cf cards lack caches. But I don't update that regularly, still on snv104. And have 2 mirrors and a hot spare. The sixth port is an esata port I use to transfer large amounts of data. This system consumes about 73 watts idle and 82 under load i/o load. (5 disks , a separate nic ,8 gb ram and a be2400 all using just 73 watts!!!) Please note that frequency scaling is only supported on the K10 architecture. But don't expect to much power saving from it. A lower voltage yields far greater savings than a lower frequency. In september I'll do a post about the afore mentioned M4A boards and an lsi sas controller in one of the pcie x16 slots.
-- Constantin Gonzalez Sun Microsystems GmbH, Germany Principal Field Technologist http://blogs.sun.com/constantin Tel.: +49 89/4 60 08-25 91 http://google.com/search?q=constantin+gonzalez Sitz d. Ges.: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1, 85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028 Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas Schroeder, Wolfgang Engels, Wolf Frenkel Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
