PCI-X Board or Chipset recommendataions

[Eric W. Biederman]

Jeremy Jackson <jerj at coplanar.net> writes:

> How LinuxBIOS friendly are the e7500/Xeons for LinuxBIOS?  Any NDA
> issues like AMD MSRs or similar?

There are no hang ups like what slowed the AMD port, and the AMD port
does not suffer from them any longer.

If you are doing serious work it does pay to go through the NDA
process with intel and get all of their documentation.  While there is
a large amount of overlap between their public and more restricted
documents the information in their private documents is easier to use,
and with an NDA you can earlier access to hardware bug reports.

> Also, I'm looking at the p4dpl-m, which has different bus layout than
> either of the p4dp's in cvs, and wondering how difficult to support.

I'm not familiar with that one.  Assuming it has the PCIH2 it should
just be a matter of tracking down the irq assignments.  Though I can
be surprised.

If you have any non-trivial changes to the bootstrap be careful.  On
the p4dpr I had to navigate my way through 3 pretty serious hardware
bugs.

Eric