[WBEL-users] Motherboard recommendation required for an AMD64 FX53 Processor

[Bob Ramstad]

Gary Mansell wrote:

> Please can someone recommend an AMD64 FX53 compatible motherboard > that they know works with WBEL 3.0.

I asked a very similar question here a few weeks ago, and received
very little in the way of usable answers.  I ended up giving up and
we'll look at upgrading our hardware in another six months or so once
other people have more experience and/or there's a respin which has a
kernel that supports some of these things right off the bat.

The most useful response I received, along with my own investigations,
lead me to believe the best course of action might be:

1) Install WBEL to a regular old IDE disk.

2) Get the kernel sources.  RPM should be fine.

3) Compile a new kernel with the appropriate new drivers.

4) Reboot into the new kernel, verify it runs OK, shut down, install
the SATA drives and boot.  They should be recognized.

5) Format / configure SATA drives.

6) Use dump and restore to copy the IDE stuff over to SATA.

7) Install the boot loader.

8) Reboot and tell the BIOS to boot from the SATA drives.  Cross fingers.

This should work to get WBEL3 working on the serial ATA drives and in
a configuration with a customized kernel where further customization
should be easy to get the other hardware working.

>From my experimentation with nForce2 boards a year or so ago, USB
worked fine, there were issues with both network and serial ATA, but
drivers for both of those were available.  I'd assume similar for any
cutting edge board.

FWIW I've been told that the software RAID in the kernel these days is
generally faster than the hardware raid solutions, especially if the
disks are on separate channels and/or SATA is being used.  Just what
I've been told.  Most people with built in SATA + RAID are just using
the SATA native without RAID and doing the RAID in software -- often
in combination with LVM.

I hope this information helps!

-- Bob