OpenBSD Journal

Support for new Core based Intel systems in 4.0

Contributed by Jonathan Gray on from the dept.

People might be interested to hear that the upcoming 4.0 release will support various features found in the new wave of Intel products that are just hitting the market. From our point of view it is mainly a bunch of additional devices that have to be supported in the south bridges. For the newer consumer boards with Core 2 Duo processors many come with the next iteration of Intel's ICH device hub (ICH8), which is noteable in that it does not provide PATA support only SATA, and moves the Ethernet MAC into the ICH chip itself in the form of a em(4) Gigabit controller. Motherboard manufacturers tend to provide an alternate disk controller to support PATA devices on such systems. So 4.0 adds support for ICH8 SATA parts, which look like ICH7 parts for our purposes, has an updated Intel Gigabit network driver based on updates provided by Intel, and also provides support for audio in the form of the azalia(4) driver.

On the Core based Xeon (Woodcrest) front, similiar changes have been made to support the 6321ESB/ESB2 device hub. Support for this just managed to make the deadline for the next release thanks to being able to test on one of cloder@'s new Xeon based servers. So anyone looking at picking up one of the these systems should keep their eyes peeled for news of 4.0 preorders.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Dunceor (192.16.134.66) on

    This is great.
    It feels like the time from the hardware being released until it's supported gets lower and lower all the time. This makes sure that you can run OpenBSD on the latest and meanest hardware.

    Cool!

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.213.205) on

      It looks like mult-core CPUs are going to be the mainstream craze for the immediate future. I wonder, does this mean more focused SMP and thread work for future (4.X) releases? It seems OpenBSD's timing for introducing SMP support was just about right.

      Comments

      1. By Nate (65.94.49.17) on

        > It looks like mult-core CPUs are going to be the mainstream craze for the immediate future. I wonder, does this mean more focused SMP and thread work for future (4.X) releases? It seems OpenBSD's timing for introducing SMP support was just about right.

        I suppose it really depends on what people want to do - it's not like there has been a huge influx of people working specifically on multiprocessor support, sure rthreads has been in development for a while and can be used but by all accounts it's not yet ready for primetime and OpenBSD's SMP is still for the most part the same as NetBSD's.

        If there is another GeNUA mbH sitting around wishing OpenBSD's SMP was a little better, than sure, you could expect more focused SMP and thread work in the future - but the developers only work on where they want, sponsors and developers are really the only ones that get to call any shots on what should see some work done on it.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (198.208.251.24) on

          > I suppose it really depends on what people want to do - it's not like there has been a huge influx of people working specifically on multiprocessor support, sure rthreads has been in development for a while and can be used but by all accounts it's not yet ready for primetime and OpenBSD's SMP is still for the most part the same as NetBSD's.

          I wonder if there are enough developers familiar enough to have a hackathon attributed to improving rthreads?

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (82.135.30.22) on

            > I wonder if there are enough developers familiar enough to have a hackathon attributed to improving rthreads?

            you wanna pay for one?
            i can get enough interesting parties together (:

      2. By Antonios Anastasiadis (89.210.246.107) on

        http://www.sigmasoft.com/~openbsd/archives/html/openbsd-misc/2006-02/msg00504.html

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