Sorry for the negative tone of this message but a little background may help.... about 1.5 months ago I bought a new machine for personal use [my only machine actually]... hw (upgraded from a p4-2.8): intel e6850 intel p35 mobo (ihc9) 4 gb (ddr2-667 1GBx4) 500 gb sata 8600 GS nvidia (replaced for reasons below witha 5200 GT) 20" widescreen crt direct cable connection to the net hp deskjet 6980 Being a FreeBSD users since the mid 90's I obviously started with it... in the quest for a working well tuned config (still a few issues even with the current config): 6.2 (cvsup'ed to most recent PL) with i386 kernel 7-current (cvsup'ed upto last night) i386 7-current amd64 The last shows the most promise so far: Issues (all of which have been posted on -questions or -x11): 6.2 -- * Horrid non-SMP kernel performence (acceptable after SMP was added) * Xorg (7.2) not working at all (vesa 640x480 with no mouse was the best I managed) * Many TCP/IP stack issues * All native java builds fail with compile errors * hplip fails immediately after install * Doesn't recognize PATA drives if installed at the same time as SATA 7-CURRENT i386 -- * Horrid performence under default kernel needed to switch to ULE/IPI_PREMEPTION/DEVICE_POLLING * Kernel sees card after install of nvidia driver but Xorg (7.3) doesn't recognize it (vesa 1024x768 only)... many address conflicts reported... nv driver is no better * All native java builds fail with compile errors * hplip fails immediately after install * Diablo-jdk15 completely broken for any GUI oriented code 7-CURRENT amd64 * Diablo-jdk15 completely broken for any GUI oriented code (jdk16 works well though) * Many desktop ports fail with i386 vs. amd64 errors * Nvidia-driver does not support amd64 (but nv works now but only at 1024x768) Misc Rants: CPUTYPE naming -- For people who have been around for a while (read mid-90's) and have never used any AMD mobo's we are used to "historical" differences between early pentiums and amd equivs (for that reason I have never bought a AMD machine)... so calling the 64bit x86 architure amd64 is confusing and misleading. HARDWARE.TXT -- hardware.txt sheds absulutly no light on the above issue except to make it clear that ia64 is not the right choice. Suggestions: * Figure out why xorg should care if your on a 32 or 64 bit addressing bus (has to do with placing pci's buffers at the high end of RAM I think) * AMD64 should be recommended (or at least better documented) for all dual-core machines * Both nvidia.ko and the nv driver need to be improved (I know this is nvidia's problem)Received on Mon Oct 01 2007 - 01:37:03 UTC
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