Looking for a new AMD motherboard with good Linux support.

January 3, 2006 7:23 PM

Please recommend a motherboard for an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor that is completely supported by Linux.

I recently purchased an MSI RS482M4/RX480M4 Series motherboard and a new AMD chip. Unfortunately, I didn't do my research well enough, and I'm having a difficult time getting Linux to recognize the onboard USB and Realtek NIC.

I could spend weeks working on fixing this problem by researching the intricacies of the board, but honestly, I'm not that attached - so what I'd like are some personal recommendations for boards that support this processor (and the RAM) that have excellent support from the Linux community for any onboard chipsets they include.

I'd like the board to have TV-Out with onboard video, and at least two free PCI slots. If there's an online resource for picking out such a board, that would be wonderful.

posted by odinsdream to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The NewEgg motherboard search tool is fairly good at doing filtered searches. It won't tell you if the motherboard supports linux, you will have to google that on your own.

Almost all of the boards that support the X2 and socket 939 dual core opterons are built with the NForce4 chip. Lots of people complain online about a lack of linux support. I have a Tyan Tomcat K8E (S2865), and the only linux issue seems to be that Linux doesn't support the SATA chip enough to enable NCQ. One of my hard drives is hanging off the built in SATA interface without any obvious problems, so I am only missing a performance boost (most hard drives don't support NCQ either, but I bought one that does).
posted by b1tr0t at 8:12 PM on January 3, 2006

Are there particular chipsets or manufacturers that are particularly responsive to working with the open-source community in developing full-featured drivers? For example - the Matrox video cards are generally very well-supported, as are 3Com network cards. Is there an equivalent motherboard brand?

With this current board - even if I did eventually get the system mostly working, I'd expect to have trouble getting, for example, the TV-Out to work without jumping through hoops.
posted by odinsdream at 9:18 PM on January 3, 2006

Here's a thread on the Gentoo forums that may be of interest.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:22 PM on January 3, 2006

The only general rule seems to be that server oriented companies are very supportive of linux (half or more of their customers are linux users), while "gamer" oriented could care less (a tiny percentage of sales go to linux users).

Tyan has a good amount of information about linux support on their website, down to specific lm_sensors config files for the various boards.

You have to spend a fair amount of time doing your own research. Even the information available on the web might be 2-5 years old, or it might have been published today. I think I spent about three weeks researching my system, a few hours building it, and then another two weeks trying to debug a cooling issue (turns out the BIOS was reporting the CPU temp 10 degrees higher than it should have, Tyan has since released a new BIOS image that fixes the problem).
posted by b1tr0t at 2:43 AM on January 4, 2006

The nForce 4 is decent enough; Sun use a Tyan based board very similar to the S2865 for their X2100 rackmount server, which fully supports Linux (more or less).

SATA on it is usable, but NCQ is undocumented for some reason; a card from Promise could be a good investment if this is important to you, since they're about as good as it gets when it comes to documentation and support.

Network wise, the nForce stuff is junk, with little more than a buggy binary blob for driver authors to poke at, and a reverse engineered driver that will *probably* work better. 3Com are OK, but Intel seem about the top of the pack here, with officially supported open source drivers and well performing hardware. Tyan's offerings sometimes also come with a Broadcom PHY which tend to work well, if not amazingly quickly with GigE.

On-board video is probably the realm of nForce 4 desktop chipsets, which nVidia provide reasonable enough official Linux support for; with their binary driver, any card of theirs with TV-out will likely work fine.
posted by Freaky at 2:33 PM on January 5, 2006