Subject: i810e and NetBSD
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Andy Ball <ball@cyberspace.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/17/2002 12:34:05
Hello!

There's been quite a bit of discussion here lately about
hardware to run NetBSD on.  Some of it I'd seen before and
some I hadn't.  In either case, I found it interesting to
read about the hardware from a NetBSD perspective, since
that has become my preferred system software.

A lot of people have been asking me lately to build machines
for them, so I've started looking at components.  One of the
mainboards that looks promising is FIC FW37 mATX, Socket370.
I've never built a machine with the Intel 810e chipset
before, and would welcome people's input as to it's
suitability.

The spec I'm looking at mentions '4Mb SDRAM display cache' -
which I'm guessing means it has a display buffer rather than
sharing the system DRAM.  Has anyone here tried running X on
something like this?

The integrated RTL8139 NIC appears in the list of machine-
independent PCI drivers (I think, I'm not sure what the BL/
CL suffixes mentioned in the board's spec signify).

I /think/ the main difference between the FW37 (whose spec.
I have in front of me) and the FW37e is support for the 1.2
GHz Celeron's AGTL bus.  I'd welcome comments from people
who've used VIA C3, or newer Intel Celeron processors with
NetBSD.

Regards,
  - Andy Ball.