Motherboard favorites for Linux?

[Warren Togami]

I have had extensive experience with many Athlon motherboards that we have
tested for AMDMB.com, especially with respects to Linuxc compatibility.
I'll post my recommendations later tonight.

Regarding onboard RAID, you may be thankful that you didn't spend extra
money for onboard RAID.  The Promise and HPT ATA RAID controllers are very
poorly supported by Linux.  While both vendors have binary-only drivers for
Red Hat 7.1, they are only for the default 2.4.2-2 kernel (and not the
update 2.4.3-x).  They are also poorly coded and very problematic with bugs.
Forget about getting any other distro running on Promise or HPT RAID with
the vendor binary-only driver unless you do some hacking and use the buggy
Red Hat 2.4.2-2 kernel.

Red Hat has been working on an open-source implementation of both Promise
and HPT RAID drivers with some success.  They currently have RAID 0 working
with most of these controllers.  For the most part it is stable, but not
entirely.  RAID 1 is in preliminary development.  It boots mostly stable,
but I don't think it can handle faults or rebuild a mirror disk yet.

Download source code here:
http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/pdcraid/

Red Hat ATA RAID kernel driver development mailing list
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ataraid-list

----- Original Message -----
From: "James A. Stroble" <stroble at hawaii.edu>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 7:18 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: Motherboard favorites for Linux?


>
> Having just built my first system from scratch (mobo transplants don't
> count), I can say that the MSI  (Microstar) K7T Turbo Limited has not
> given me any problems.  The vendor did send me the non-RAID version
> instead of the one with the Promise controller I ordered, but they
> refunded the difference in price. Probably saved me lots of trouble.