[clug] Nightmare that is NForce2 on Linux

[Andrew Over]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 05:01:11PM +1100, Darren Freeman wrote:

> The binary-only drivers are a real turn-off too.
> 
> Anybody else had one of these mobos running Linux? They're supposed to
> be the best Athlon motherboard you can get for your typical desktop
> machine. But I'm about to recommend that nobody ever try to run Linux on
> them. I can't access four of my six USB ports and they lock the machine
> with a burner attached. Fortunately IEEE-1394 works perfectly.

I've got an MSI-mumblemumble (nforce2), and have had no problems (heh,
and thus not sure i can be too useful to you).

Have you tried a more recent kernel?  There's been a long-running thread
about stability and random nforce2 lockups on lkml at some point in the
past few months... not too sure what came of it, but i believe some
patches went in 2.6.x at the bare minimum.

As for binary drivers, they should no longer be necessary.   Last I
checked there was native support for everything (IDE, sound, AGP, USB,
...).  Native ethernet may not be in 2.4 kernels, but google for
"forcedeth" (a reverse engineered nvnet replacement... it's in the -mm
kernels at the very least and works ok here).

Cheers,
--Andrew