Giga-byte GA-8KNXP mainboard

[fredex]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 10:03:58PM +0300, Georgios Petasis wrote:
> I have a similar model (K8NNXP) which also has the same raid chips
> on board. I have never tried the IT8212 chip, but under core 2
> you can use the Sil3112 chip as a plain IDE controller.
> This means that you can't have raid with this chip for the
> 2 serial ata disks under linux.

I'm not familiar with that particular Gigabyte board, but I'm running
TaoLinux (a RHEL 3 clone) on a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 board, and it
uses the same IT8212 chip.

Using the 2.4 kernel, I'm able to use it to provide support for another 4
IDE drives (though so far I've only used one drive on it, I'm not really
interested in RAID for this home machine). You can get the driver
sources from:

	http://www.ite.com.tw/productInfo/Download.html#IT8212%20ATA133%20Controller

Latest version is 1.45, which I'm using now.

There are instructions (somewhere there) for making an initrd with the
driver, so you can have boot-time support. I'm not using it to boot so
I'm just inserting modules at boot time.

I haven't used it under Fedora, but I'd expect you could make it work, 
there's source there for a 2.6 kernel.

> 
> Under fedora core 1, the Sil3112 is not recognised at all,
> so if you want to access disks in it you must have a 2.6 kernel,
> which means at least core 2. I have contacted both Sil & gigabyte
> many times for raid support on the Sil3112 as a plain
> customer. Sil didn't answer at all, and gigabyte suggested to 
> install windows (they even pointed a link to download the 64-bit
> beta version!!!). I think you can find raid functionality on the Sil3112
> if you ran redhat 8/9, but not fedora releases (32/64 bit).

I've not looked at using the SATA on this board at all, not having any
SATA drives (having plenty of capacity in PATA drives on the shelf here
and seeing no value in spending another bundle to buy the new drives yet.
some day when I need the capacity and maybe Linux support will have 
evolved into a more mature state. At the moment I've got around 160
gigs in the machine, I think that will hold me for the present!).

> 
> Gigabyte does not seem to have good customer support (they don't
> even provide a utility of monitoring cpu temp & fun speed!).
> Lets hope that the hardware at least lives more than a year...

The one time I asked an email question I at least got a prompt reply!

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Maurice K" <maurice at gkbikes.com>
> To: "Fedora list" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2004 2:20 PM
> Subject: Giga-byte GA-8KNXP mainboard
> 
> 
> > Has anyone experience with this mainboard's extra possibillities
> > (IDE3/IDE4 or SATA2-4) on Fedora Core 2?
> > 
> > The chipset for IDE3+4 is an IT8212  and for SATA it's a Sil3112.
> > both can be used for raid 0, 1, 0+1, jbod and standard.
> > IDE1+2 and SATA1+2 is handles by the ICH5.
> > With the mainboard comes a cd with an adapted kernel for redhat 7.3
> > (kernel 2.4) but I run the latest kernel which I got from up2date.
> > 
> > In the near future I want to buy a new harddisk and IDE1+2 are full.
> > For IDE1 it's 160GB + 40GB and for IDE2 it's cd-rw + DVD+rw
> > 
> > I'm fairly new to linux and want to know if these chips are recognised
> > by kernel 2.6 or that I have to use drivers for them (and where to get).

-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
                        The Lord is like a strong tower. 
             Those who do what is right can run to him for safety.
--------------------------- Proverbs 18:10 (niv) -----------------------------
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