So the boss decides to get himself a new K7 system to speed building release candidates. A noble cause indeed. Unfortunately, the hardware issues that came along with it led to much swapping of parts around, and thus some notes on a few of the AMD K7 compatible boards around. For a more exhaustive analysis of the marketplace, I would recommend Tom's Hardware.

Asus K7V
Based on a VIA chipset, supports PC133 SDRAM. Will lock up during POST with ECC SDRAM and ECC enabled. BIOS anti-virus protection is incompatible with FreeBSD and must be disabled.

Asus K7M
Based on the AMD 751 chipset, supports PC100 SDRAM. Probably the all-round favorite at the moment, considered to be a very stable board.

FIC SD-11
Another favorite, although with a few dedicated detractors. Also based on the AMD 751 chipset.

Note that none of these boards is particularly replete with onboard peripherals beyond the norm; only the K7M goes so far as to offer onboard sound, the rest just the normal complement of ATA and floppy interfaces, serial and parallel ports, and of course USB.

Some time back, we obtained a Linksys Gigadrive for experimentation and to investigate the possiblities that might be had for converting the unit to run FreeBSD (rather than Linux). See our notes here for more details.

Bob Willcox kindly donated this board a little while back now, but we've had some issues with it in SMP mode due to the presence of two I/O APICs. Thanks to a recent patch to 5-current and 4-stable by Luoqi Chen, we're now up and running fine.

Other items of note with this board:

• Onboard sound isn't supported.
• The fxp driver complains about an unknown phy type, but works in half-duplex mode.
• Onboard SCSI works fine, except that it is probed last, so any other PCI storage card installed takes first boot priority. This is quite an irritating mistake, since the onboard IDE is probed early, and almost all storage adapters are able to usurp the boot order when configured to do so.
• Work is underway to take advantage of the quantum-noise random number source.
• The board is physically quite large, and has some odd mounting requirements that mean that it's best installed in one of Supermicro's own cases.

On the whole, this is an excellent board, and runs FreeBSD very well.