Athlon Motherboards And Chipsets Under Linux

appletnc from linhardware.com points us to their article about Athlons and Linux. They're trying to sort out the compatibility problems rumored to exist with the boards and chipsets. He says "Despite SuSE's Athlon workaround and RedHat's (in)compatibility note, etc.) and rumors, we have not seen many reports of problems by LhD users. Are Linux users actually experiencing problems with Athlon motherboards? Given that the outstanding price/performance value of the Athlon, the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"

Comments

ASUS K7V -- Linux Tested & Certified

[nd]

I have an Athlon 750 w/ the ASUS K7V (KX133) board.

An interesting note about this board is that on the box, listed among its various features is a Linux 'icon', with a checkmark and the text "linux-tested.com". Apparantly this is some sort of certification for Linux hardware.

I was curious about this, so I went to linux-tested.com and read up. Asus actually paid these guys money to put this board through various Linux tests (both distro and non-distro specific), and it passed everything. This is a really nice thing for Asus to do, and I thank them for it.

Athlon Problems Explained

[drig]

There were two problems with running Athlon machines. First, the Memory Type Register Range support was broken in old kernels. Any new distribution should support them. If the kernel hangs before mounting the drives, try a later versions.

Second was the AGP problems. These are still getting worked out, but it looks like there are working drivers for certain kernel versions. I believe these are yet to be merged in the official kernels, but it can't be long now. This caused hangs when starting X Windows.

Both are solved. The first was a real problem. It caused the machine to not boot. The second was only a problem if you wanted really fast 3D speeds.

-Dave