Riding the 64-bit Chariot: Choosing Socket 939 and Linux
by Kristopher Kubicki on July 19, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Subjective Testing
One of the most immediate and discouraging issues with SuSE/VIA/NVIDIA was an issue using the YAST updated NVIDIA driver. It seems as though our installation was extremely picky about the order of the installation, so we just installed the driver manually after several failed attempts with YAST.There were other various "gotchas" as far as Linux and these reference boards go, in general. Even VIA's core logic is still identified as K8T400, the previous code name to the chipset rather than K8T800.
Audio and integrated Ethernet were critical components in this analysis. Although we were not going to benchmark and debate whether NVIDIA or VIA has better audio quality, what we did want to see is which platform provided better support. NVIDIA tends to incorporate all of its components into single chips, but VIA spreads their chipsets out a little farther. It turns out that both methods have drawbacks in Linux.
| Chip | Comments |
| VIA VT8237 (Southbridge) | SATA RAID support seems incomplete on x86_64 |
| VIA VT6306 (Firewire) | Fully Supported |
| VIA K8T800 (Northbridge) | - |
| VIA VT6122 (Gigabit PHY) | - |
| VIA VT1720 (Envy Audio) | Only partially supported? |
| VIA VT6421 (SATA RAID) | - |
| VIA VT1616 (AC'97) | ALSA supported |
| NVIDIA nForce3 250GB | Gigabit Ethernet not supported |
| Realtek ALC850 | Fully supported |
Our via82xx blanket driver detects some sound device, but SuSE never recognizes a device. The ALSA project, which is integrated into SuSE 9.1, provides some support for the chip, but it seems as though there are a lot of missing features for Envy. Parts of the source are released for those brave enough.
We also run into issues with AGPGART on the VIA board (both 64-bit and 32-bit).
agpgart: Unsupported VIA chipset (device id: 0282)
We would like to see a Hyperion driver for Linux, particularly since sorting through all the little nitpicks becomes particularly discouraging for Linux. Our drivers are supposed to be installed in the kernel, but clearly some things are not.
NVIDIA is not without problems either. Getting either the VIA or NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet working out of the box became more trouble than it was worth. The second VIA reference board (built by MSI) uses a Realtek 8110S, which is supported right in the kernel. Even after installing the nForce platform drivers for Linux on AMD64, we were unable to get the integrated GB Ethernet working. The secondary strong point of nForce GB, NVIDIA's firewall and configuration software, seems moot compared to the robustness and completeness of Linux's in-kernel packet filtering.
VIA has traditionally been behind the curve (compared to NVIDIA anyway), but they definitely deserve credit for the amount of work that they have done. A unified Linux driver would put them in a much better position for further adoption.
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gherald - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link
Must be something wrong with firefox then, because I've tried disabled all popup protection to the point where I get a lot of ads at other sites, but still cannot open this comments page.Even if it works perfectly for everyone else in the world, I still say it's stupid to have this in a popup.
-posted from opera
TrogdorJW - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#21 - does the registry corrupt itself, or does the user cause the corruption, or is it spyware/virus/trojan related? I'm betting on the last more than the others. Of course, if you're constantly tweaking your setup, problems can occur, but that happens with ANY operating system. Hell, after getting XP configured and setup properly, I didn't need to do a reinstall for over two years, and the only reason I ended up reinstalling was when my motherboard died on me.The only thing MS really needs to fix now is some of the default settings. Storing individual temp files for each user? Why would we actually want that? Setting aside 10% of your hard drive space for Temporary Internet Files (which are almost never used), and another 10% for System Restore!? That's stupid. If you need to use System Restore to return to a point more than three months in the past, there's a decent chance it won't work or will cause more problems than it fixes. However, these aren't huge problems; they're just annoyances.
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
No operating system should fatally crash by simply ending task or terminating a process.You are right 18#, it isn't hard keeping it clean, but then again I end up reinstalling it about every 8 months since the registry corrupts itself, not fatally, but just to make your favorite app not work anymore, or it take forever to boot up.
kd4yum - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Kristopher: Any idea whatever happened to the MSI K8N 939-pin motherboard you folks used in the High End System Guide a few weeks ago? I can not find that motherboard anywhere. Has MSI scrapped it? When and where will it be for sale?balzi - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#15 -- I think something screwed up on the articles Gaming Benchmarks. UT2004 has a native Linux 64 bit version - so it would run a 64bit app. on 64 bit drivers, and i assume they saw awesome FPS gains. however this page:http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2127...has no graphs relating to UT2004 64bit.. hmm?!?!?
On the SATA RAID support.. I just bought a ASUS K8V (K8T800) .. granted it's a S754 board but the VIA southbridge remains the same [8237] I think.. anyway.. I had big problems getting hte RAID going, in fact I didn't get it going and had to opt for the Promise RAID controller onboard.. Gigabit Ethernet was provided by a Marvel Yukon chipset.. ASUS chose good here.. SuSE 9.0 picked it up eventually. though not straigth away.
I sincerely hope VIA see some of these comments about their on-die SATA RAID support for Linux.
as a consolation - I used the VIA instructions with some minor changes to get the Promise controller going.. they were sufficiently vague yet all-encompassing to be applicable. :)
Balzi
tfranzese - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Linux isn't without it's problems #17. I wish I had the time or willingness to get more into Linux, but for all my needs (programming) it gets the job done without me having to spend too much time learning anything extra. Bashing Windows is quite sad though on all your parts, it isn't too hard to keep a clean and stable Windows installation.sprockkets - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
The last BSOD I got on someone's computer was simply to end process on a trojan horse in winxp. Sad.tfranzese - Monday, July 19, 2004 - link
I can't remember the last time I had a BSOD when I wasn't messing with my hardware setup changing things around.I'm sad for people who still live in the past.
TrogdorJW - Monday, July 19, 2004 - link
#14 - Oh, yeah, I get blue screens ALL the time while gaming on XP. Mostly, it involves underwater scenes, though. Last time I had a BSOD on XP? Probably a few weeks ago. Last time I had a BSOD on a system that wasn't *overclocked*? I can't even remember.On the article:
"Mental ray seems optimized for NVIDIA, but it does not seem to provide a distinct advantage going from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture." Duh - you mention that only a 32-bit version is available, so why should it benefit at all from 64-bit? Unlike games, which rely heavily on graphics drivers, Mental Ray is more of a CPU dependent application, so 64-bit graphics drivers aren't going to help it score higher.
"Surprisingly, the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit UT2004 was a little more than we expected. The case for 64-bit is extremely strong with this benchmark." I'm a little confused here - it seems to me that the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit was much larger on W:ET than on UT2K4. Still, it's good to see *any* performance increase under 64-bit for a game. Is UT2K4 actually available in both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux binaries now? That wasn't made entirely clear in the article. IIRC, you're still running UT2K4 as a 32-bit game on a 64-bit OS, right? Only the drivers are 64-bit enabled.
Overall, though, great article. With the updated Nvidia graphics drivers that provide support for 4K stack kernels (like Fedora Core 2), things are getting better. On a side note, I was finally able to get the Nvidia driver to run properly on my friend's 3000+ system (Chaintech ZNF-250 motherboard) by installing it manually from the command line and then run SaX2 to configure X. The old Nvidia driver crashed the system when I tried to install it, although AT never seemed to have that problem.