NForce4 support?

[Paladine01]

How well is the NForce4 supported in Linux? I know Nvidia has binary drivers but I'm not entirely sure which devices on the motherboard the drivers support. Is SATA fully supported and gigabit ethernet (with jumbo frame support)?

I want to upgrade my server with an AMD64 + PCIxpress solution + gigabit ethernet with jumbo frames. The NForce4 has all the features now but I'd like to hear some success stories from owners. Thanks!

[fourhead]

I installed Gentoo yesterday on my new Athlon64 3000+, MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (nForce4), MSI Geforce 6200 graphics (PCIe) and S-ATA harddrive and everything worked right from the start. No problems whatsoever - except the NVidia graphics driver won't load - but there are many people in the forum that have it working, so it must be a misconfiguration by myself somewhere. I have X running with the nv driver though. I definitely can recommend it! It's freaking fast and everything works!

Tom

[Shadow Skill]

I think it depends on the maker of the Nforce board [I have a chaintentec model VNF ultra I believe.]I can tell you that the livecd I used did not detect my ethernet port properly but I was able to get it going wih nvidia's drivers, with the kernel upgrade to 2.6.11 everything is working as it should. I do not have any sata hdd's though so I cannot vouch for their compatibility personally.
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[wantilles]

About a week ago I installed from 2004.3-r1 amd64 live-CD on my brand-new DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR with an nVidia GeForce 6800GT PCI-express graphics card.

No problems at all.

All I had to do during installation was:

[intruder-x]

wantilles, did u running gentoo_amd64 on tho SiI3114 controller or the nForce4 sata controller?i've search around and found that nForce4 sata was a bit buggy on x86_64 linux arch.I'm on the way deciding between DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D or DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR for my new system. I consider this issue a normal one since those nForce4 really new, but i know that SiI3114 have been around for quite some times. If fhe silicon image controller was good at present i think i've to choose the SLI-DR and i think i'll be using the nForce4 sata later on.but, if u really don't encountered any issue using the nForce4 sata then i'll give a shot at the Ultra-D. I could save the price diference between the board for the processor.

price diff between those took around $100, but thats for USD,in my country thats a lot of money and with the same price of SLI-DR i could get MSI K8N Diamong which is equipped with SB Live24 bit(not really looking for,this one wasn't working with emu10K1) and the SiI3132 SATA-II controller(this one can carry up to 10 drive(5 each port) using the port multiplier and not just the controller with 2 port sata,not to forget it was running on PCIe bus,but it still not working under linux).

maybe u can help me decide, thanks in advance

[dragonian]

I have the sil3114 controller working great without any issues. It's currently driving my 3x 300 gb in sw raid 5.
It worked out of the box on my gigabyte nF4 board. I did swap one of the harddrives over to my other controller, and saw the kernel recognize it, but never used it.

[intruder-x]

dragonian,thanks for the info.the Sil3114 controller already recognized as a matured sata controller in linux and etc OS.The software raid stabilty result of the onboard Sil3114 were mixed from one m/board to the other(due to diff Raid BIOS rev and sometimes because of the buggy BIOS or continuos error produce by the onboard chip).I'm not into the software raid business(except the linux sw raid) since my experience with a bunch of this sw controller wasn't up to my expectation(SiI3112,ICH5R-6R etc etc).I prefer the hardware raid controller because my data was a top priority for me(seriosly,what the point using raid if u can't access your data due to some of the silly sw raid probs?).It's already happens to me here(i've bunch of arch here,from PII katmai to prescott,but not x86_64).If its happens that i want to use onboard raid,it would be raid 0 for OS drive,but for data(personal/critical) storage, i only use sata. Anyway,it's vary on one person perception to the other.

The "other controller" you mention here was the nForce4 sata controller. As for my experience, some of the new hardware just work out of the box in linux,but in terms of pure stability it was another story.Why not try to do some agressive partitioning of drive or raid setting on that controller?(something like mixing raid level,mix a lot of fs type and os,not to forget mixing harddrive brand)Then run it with heavy task for more than a week.I bet that will tell us the true stability of it in linux and it would give a good help to the other linux user.Linux is great but manufacturer support wasn't that great in linux. Well, i'm just suggesting, not asking or pushing you to do that Thanks again for the info anyway.

[dragonian]

Oh, certainly I wouldn't use the hardware's built-in software raid. I don't trust that as far as I can throw it. I agree that they are very buggy, and i certainly not going to trash my data if i change motherboards, controllers, etc.

I'm just using the controller as a JBOD, and using the linux kernel md software raid.

[pwe]

i have gigabyte nf4 - works fine!
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[intruder-x]

good news there dragonian,so how was it?is it running great within this few days or week with JBOD + md raid?

[dragonian]

[intruder-x]

great!i can't wait for my DFI Lanparty nF4 Ultra-D.it has been a shortage of stock here.have to wait for about 2 weeks or so Planning to play a lot of gentoos on that machine,

[gmorgan_va]

All my drives (CD, hard drive) are SATA only and the 2005.0 AMD64 universal install CD fails to detect the CD or hard drive. Any hints to trick the kernel into recognizing the nVidia SATA at install time?

Thanks.

[madman2003]

I don't use gentoo(or any kind of linux) atm, but i've seen tips come by a few times.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-300023-highlight-nforce4.html
Half way through the first page, some have used forcedeth for their lan though iirc.

[gmorgan_va]

Ok, I have a Knoppix 3.7 [En] CD and it successfully boots with the default (2.4.x) kernel. When I try the knoppix26 kernel on this CD it has the same problem as the 2005.0 Gentoo Universal Install CD... It does not find any SATA drives. Please let me know what I can try to help fix this problem.

[dragonian]

[gmorgan_va]

I did an lsmod at the shell run from the boot> prompt in Gentoo and the sata_nv module was already loaded. It just didn't find any devices when it loaded. I could do a lspci too and post that when I get a minute if that would be helpful.

[Tanisete]

I installed Gentoo in an Asus A8N-SLI (nforce4) with 2004.3 using as kernel parameters "noapic" and "acpi=off". In that case, i could modprobe sata_nv without problems. Every time i booted from the live cd without these options, i couldn't load it.

Since that, i've used morph-sources as my kernel and everything run smooth!

I hope this helps...

[racoontje]

2005.0 works fine -- I only needed those flags on 2004.3

[gmorgan_va]

I think the difference here is that my only CD/DVD drive is SATA only. So, when I put the install CD in the CD drive the kernel (with sata_nv module loaded) does not find the NVidia SATA controller and therefore does not find the SATA CD drive and can't find the install CD.

Again, this works find in the default kernel on Knoppix 3.7 live CD which is from the 2.4 series of kernels. The knoppix26 kernel/modules fails the same way that the default kernel/modules on the Gentoo 2005.0 CD fails. I assume some bug was introduced in either the kernel or the sata_nv module between the 2.4 series of kernels and the 2.6 series.

Also, I have tried the "noapic" option and it did not affect anything. Also tried disabling IDE DMA but that does not seem to change anything either. Maybe I need to go get the 2004.3 ISO and just forget 2005.0 for now.

[tscolari]

my processor is coming this weekend and im going to install gentoo on my new nf4 computer here :p
I woulder, are the nf4 drivers the same i use in the nforce2 ones?

I ask because searching in the kernel i find
"reverse engenieered... nforce network drivers"
"nfoce audio stuff"
etc..
are they the same or diferent?

I tryed to find something in nvidia site here, i saw they have a diferent graphic driver for amd64, but in "nFocer4 standalone" there are only windows drivers, i found only linux(and amd64) drivers in "Unified Drivers" with seems to be the same for all nforceX chipsets... im a bit confused...
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Tiago Scolari

[ferrarif5]

If you are using the later 2.6 series kernel (not sure about 2.4) then apparently forcedeth driver will work for networking, not sure though as I use the marvel NIC on mine, as for audio am sure you just select the intel8x0 driver and it should work, again I don't use it and I stuck a Sound Blaster 1024 Live since it does duplex .

If you used an nforce based system before you should be fine for kernel configuration, it's the same.
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[tscolari]