Being prepared for something is a good thing, whether it will happen or not. How did Slackware install on that system? Or Debian stable? Or RedHat ES?
Slackware installed fine. As did gentoo. And debian stable. Let's not forget RH 7.3, RH 9, FC1, Suse 9.0, 9.1...Rest assured, I've installed my share of distro's on this box .
I personally wouldn't trust it, and would never compare anything that is supposed to be as good as nVidia's ethernet (Anandtech benchmarks made it look pretty damn yummy ) to a realtek card.
Not quite sure what you mean by this...you saying the realtek is just too horrible card to try to compare anything with it?
I've read about issues on OpenBSD with various parts, including the IDE system. I don't trust it.
Can't comment here, as I don't run any of the *BSD's...Would you care to provide a few links?
I'll let my few year old VIA based motherboards know that. They'll be sad to hear as they chug away doing what they do best.
What about their early sckt A chipsets? they had horrible issues...sure, they will come out with a good chipset every once in awhile. My #2 issue is the number of times I've seen fixes for VIA-only issues in various changelogs for programs...also, I've noticed that during heavy loads, VIA-based mobo's seem to lose some of the precision with the mouse on the ps/2 port. hard to describe, but, I can just "tell" when I sit down at a computer with one of those "affected" motherboards.
My #1 problem I've seen only on VIA motherboards: IRQ assignments. Just try filling up all your slots with PCI cards...Most of the time, only one or two configurations of which card goes in which slot works...This is usually not the case with motherboards with competing chipsets.
If I get a chance, I'll try it. I'm not sure why I would want to fill them up though. I probably have enough PCI cards lying around to fill up the year or so old computer I've got sitting on the desk here.
I'd better come out of my generalization-cloud, and state specifics:
I've dealt with 3 VIA-based motherboards, 2 with K6'es, and 1 with a pentium II. All of them had this issue.
Also of note, a VIA-based dell has usb issues...
I've also dealt with an intel-based mobo, an sis-based mobo, and my current nforce2-based mobo. None of them have this issue.
Why not buy nVidia? Because they don't support F/OSS. Because they are openly hostile to the community. Because I cannot trust them. It's the same reason I avoid Intel. Intel opens up a hell of a lot more than nVidia though. At the moment nVidia is letting Linux users suck off their teat of mediocrity, when all they have to do is give up a bit of documentation.
OK, I'm not a dev, can't comment here. It's very possible you are right.
If I look at the list of supported NICs on the OpenBSD HCL, I can find just about every major vendor out there. Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, Realtek, whoever is making Linksys's ethernet chipsets these days, etc. But where is nVidia? Ethernet is nothing. Everyone and their grandmother has their own chipset, and they're fairly open (to varying degrees). Intel writes open source drivers (BSD licensed drivers for FreeBSD, and maybe GPL for Linux(?)). Where are the open source drivers from nVidia? Where is the documentation?
OK, don't have enough experience to comment intelligently here...thing is, though, my particular motherboard(and ones with specs close to it) seem to have a high degree of support in-kernel, which would mean open source, reverse-engineered or not...
One thing, though, what about VIA? do they provide the required info for people to make FOSS drivers?
I understand they have tech in their video cards that they cannot release. Fine, they write excellent 2D drivers for X11 (I'm using it right now in fact). I can deal with a closed source 3d driver for the most part (although I would encourage them to do better in the future). But that makes absolutely no sense for ethernet, IDE, etc. Screw them.
I've been using AMD chipsets since I got my first Athlon 550 (I think the 600s or the 650s were the latest at the time, so I got on the bandwagon pretty damned early). As you may know one of the parts of the chipset (south bridge?) is provided by VIA. The boards have been serving me pretty well, lasting quite a while. I've gotten several VIA only boards since I started making computers. 2 of them were trash, but that was my fault for not researching those particular boards better. The machine I'm typing this on is a VIA based machine. It's been pretty damned stable, and I couldn't ask for much more.
I've never used AMD chipsets. The two chipsets I was comparing were the socket A VIA+nforce chipsets. IIRC, when I bought my setup(almost exactly a year ago), the AMD chipsets were outdated, and were not used by the major manufactures, and so I never even considered them. can't comment here.