On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 23:07:56 -0600, Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org> wrote:
> (Re. the NetBSD/amd64 portion of your question.)
> 
> If by "Opteron", you mean technically the Opteron CPU (as opposed to the
> other AMD64 CPU (Athlon 64, or whatever)), I'm not sure.  But if it
> has a PCI or AGP slot, I think that the same cards as work with i386
> would work with AMD64 for X servers.  (I don't know about laptops or
> others with motherboard video.)
> 
> If you mean to include the "low end" AMD64 CPUs (Athlon 64, or whatever):
> I would suggest avoiding nVidia nForce3 based motherboards.  (I've ranted
> about that before, though.  (^&)

I am running amd64 2.99.16 or thereabouts on an Iwill ZMAXdp (Nforce3
250), as well as i386 3.99.1. As long as you don't expect NVRaid and
the onboard Ethernet to work, the rest seems just fine. Luckily there
is one PCI slot in the box, so I could get some network connection...

I couldn'r get amd64 2.99.16 to recognize the second CPU until I made
something like GENERIC.MPACPI (there wasn't such a thing in
amd64/conf); also i386 3.99.1 GENERIC.MPACPI kernel resets the system
almost immediately (but GENERIC.MP works just fine).

The system was very stable with upto Opteron 250 CPUs, I had since
replaced these with two Opteron 252s; this caused many problems -
resets and just hangs - until I updated the BIOS to the latest 1.10,
but somehow along the many tries to replace the hardware I managed to
knock down a passive heatsink - glued to six small elements on the
board - and now it can't stay longer than an hour or so...

> 
> Pre-2.0 -current, or 2.0+ releases should run well, as far as I know.
> 
> Just my 2.718281828459045... cents.

even less...

> 
> --
>   "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/
>