[plug] Linux hardware compatibility

[Brad Campbell]

Michael Collard wrote:

> I hear a few people saying things like this regarding VIA chipsets but
> I've never seen it. What are the actual problems that you have?

On the server I have 14 Hard disks, spread across 3x Promise SATA150TX4 PCI boards, 2 On board VIA 
SATA ports and 1 on board VIA ATA Port.

If I stream a read from 2 drives on the promise controllers (any one) I can saturate the PCI bus.
I can get sustained transfer rates of 120MB/s. If I then try across boards, 1 drive on 1 board and 
one on another, this drops to about 70MB/s. If I spread the load across all the boards (as you do in 
a 10 drive RAID-5) I drop to below 50MB/s.

When utilising the network interfaces at the same time, my PCI bus throughput often drops to about 
20MB/s. Not hard disk bandwidth. Calculated bandwith accounting for the network cards and hard disk 
controllers. It just blows goats. This just never happened on an AMD760 chipset.

As for the HTPC. I have 2 BT878 based cards, one analogue tuner and a DVB card. The bandwidth 
limitations there become really apparent when trying to record from analogue and DVB at the same 
time. Again, never on an AMD760 chipset. Plus if I init one of the BT878 cards incorrectly, it locks 
the PCI bus completely solid. Hard hang up that not even the NMI oopser can recover from. This did 
not happen on an Intel chipset.

Brad