New Motherboard

[gezza]

Hi  to all,
I am looking at new motherboard and bits for home use, my older (read 5-6 years) systems are failing, so I am looking at the new system to replace most of them.
It will sport Sata 3 and USB 3 and realtelk sound systems. My question is...Will PCLinuxos support this motherboard?
The board itself is a ASUS GA-890GPA-UD3H-AM3 AMD 890GX
It will have 8GB DDR3 ram and 2*1.5TB Sata 2 HDD's plus a Blue-Ray DVD RW
I understand USB 3 has been supported by Linux for some time !!
Many thanks,
Gezza

[Old-Polack]

Hi  to all,
I am looking at new motherboard and bits for home use, my older (read 5-6 years) systems are failing, so I am looking at the new system to replace most of them.
It will sport Sata 3 and USB 3 and realtelk sound systems. My question is...Will PCLinuxos support this motherboard?
The board itself is a ASUS GA-890GPA-UD3H-AM3 AMD 890GX
It will have 8GB DDR3 ram and 2*1.5TB Sata 2 HDD's plus a Blue-Ray DVD RW
I understand USB 3 has been supported by Linux for some time !!
Many thanks,
Gezza

Buy it and try it, then report back here. Once you've done that we'll all have a definitive answer. 

[T6]

if i heard well, the 890 chipset from amd will work fine, i don't know abut sata 3 but usb 3 is supported by the current kernel afik

the problem could be the integrated video card if you are going to have another video card installed, these motherboards can jump from one video card to the other and xorg confuses for this

[ruel24]

Gezza, first of all, you sure that model number isn't a Gigabyte motherboard? A Google search yielded me a bunch of hits for Gigabyte motherboards with that model, not Asus. Second, kernel 2.6.31 has USB 3.0 support and PCLinuxOS 2010 ships with 2.6.32, so you should be good there. As far as Linux support on SATA 3, I think it depends on support for the south bridge. I can't find anything about support for it in Linux, but I assume it should be in there. If not, there is also SATA 2 ports and you could use that until an updated kernel comes along.

[exploder]

8 GB of RAM will work as long as you go with the pae kernel.

[gezza]

Hi to all,
Many thanks for replying. You are right, it is a GigaByte motherboard.
I am having some problems finding the right kind of ran for this board here in OZ. It is a pity manufactures all have  a qualified list of ram that can be used and then do not run ram that can be found that actually matches their specs.
This system will be built slowly as pensions in OZ allow.
Again, Many thanks for your replies.
Further....how is support for Blue-Ray DVD?
Gezza

[gezza]

Hi Guy's
Well I now have the new motherboard and and a few queries.
It is working well but I had to install a normal Sata DVD to get PCLos to install.
It boots from the Pioneer Blue-ray drive then gets lost. It does appear the Blue-ray is not supported at boot time.
It is currently installed on a sata2 drive in a sata3 space and that is where I am at this time.
I currently have 8GB of Ram on board, and am using the 128MB on board video using none of the install ram.
I have a 1TB usb2 drive and have just tried it in the usb3 port. I am told that it 1TB drive cannot be mounted?
Correction I tried it again and the second time it mounted.
Is usb3 not backwards compatible with usb2?
It was mounted straight away on the usb2 port!
In 2 weeks time I will get a sata3 drive (only 600GB available over here) and try to install on sata3 in a sata 3 port.
I would like to get the Blue-ray drive bootable as I have 2 DVD's in the system now.
When I look in the PCL control center is see the 2 drives. The contents of the cd inserted is also visiible.
I can play DVD films from the Blue-ray-Not Blue-ray, I don't have one.
So... the only real problem is PCLos not booting from the blue-ray drive.
Any thoughts?
Many thanks for all your replys.
Gezza

[coolbreeze]

After reading this you might want to change your mind about Blu-ray, this from Jan this year.

http://themediaviking.com/software/bluray-linux/

So get another DVD drive for now, or install from a flash drive.

[gezza]

Hi to all,
well I have aquired some Ram for this system and a sata 3 drive.
It does appear that PCLinuxos does support sata 3 although I would like to ask your opinions
about formatting and partitioning this drive.
The drive is sata 3 1Tb with 64MB ram on board.
One of our contributors did suggest that his system was all on extended partitions.
Would one consider this reasonable. I believe the number of partitions in extended space is limited? So perhapse using primary partitions also should be done?
Using extended partitions does decrease my booting from (on sata 2) 50sec to over 3 mins, on sata 3!
I have removed a lot of files from the system to improve the boot time to no avail.
Apart from doing a reformat on the drive to have Primary partitions.I am not sure where the greater time comes from. I did a remaster of the sata 2 drive and burnt it to a DVD. I then installed this on the sata 3 drive. I would have thought that the boot times would be shorter!!
Your thoughts on this subject will be greatfully received
OK I have removed, via synaptic, anything that was loaded at boot time but also installed in the kernel. the system now boots in 58 seconds but does not now have the ATI driver so uses the default driver. Now since the sata 2 boots in 50 secs, I would have expected the sata 3 to be faster not slower!!!!
Gezza

[Old-Polack]

gezza:

With the ATA/IDE scheme, 63 partitions were allowed, even when drives were under 1 GB total size. Now, with multi TB drives in sight, all hard drives are seen by the kernel as being SCSI drives, and one is limited to 15 partitions, no matter the drive's physical size. Four of those are reserved for primary partitions, and one of those is used as the logical partition container we know as an extended partition. Why with such a limitation would one choose to throw away three perfectly good primary partitions?

My 1 TB drive; out of partitions, but with empty space still available.

[root@littleboy ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Code: [Select]

Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1          39      313236   83  Linux
/dev/sdc2              40        1047     8096760   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc3            1048        7127    48837600   83  Linux
/dev/sdc4            7128      121601   919512405    5  Extended
/dev/sdc5            7128       20500   107418591   83  Linux
/dev/sdc6           20501       33267   102550896   83  Linux
/dev/sdc7           33268       37158    31254426   83  Linux
/dev/sdc8           37159       41049    31254426   83  Linux
/dev/sdc9           41050       44940    31254426   83  Linux
/dev/sdc10          44941       48831    31254426   83  Linux
/dev/sdc11          48832       61886   104864256   83  Linux
/dev/sdc12          61887      101050   314584798+  83  Linux
/dev/sdc13         101051      104942    31262458+  83  Linux
/dev/sdc14         104943      108893    31736376   83  Linux
/dev/sdc15         108894      113071    33559753+  83  Linux


EDIT: Scratch that, and check out this. 

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,74426.new.html#new

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,74426.msg610917.html#msg610917

[Was_Just19]

It seems the limit on the number of partitions per drive may be a thing of the past ....

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,74426.msg610880.html#msg610880


Now no need to worry about using those primary partitions as the number of Logical Partitions is near enough limitless.   

[gezza]

Hi Guy's,
Many thanks for your help.
I have another question for this board.
I have a sata2 drive on its sata2 port and a sata3 drive on its  sata3 port.
If I run hdparm on both drives (both 1TB) they return almost the same data. The sata3 being about 8% faster than sata2.
Does this sound reasonable?
Your thoughts on this subject greatfully received.
Gezza

[Old-Polack]

Hi Guy's,
Many thanks for your help.
I have another question for this board.
I have a sata2 drive on its sata2 port and a sata3 drive on its  sata3 port.
If I run hdparm on both drives (both 1TB) they return almost the same data. The sata3 being about 8% faster than sata2.
Does this sound reasonable?
Your thoughts on this subject greatfully received.
Gezza

Don't have a clue when it comes to hdparm these days as it simply returns this kind of information with any command.

HDIO_SET_32BIT failed: Invalid argument
HDIO_SET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

This is on IDE drives, when seen as sda devices.   

Sata:

[root@littleboy ~]# hdparm -i /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument
 HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument

[root@littleboy ~]# sdparm -i /dev/sdc
    /dev/sdc: ST310003  33AS             
malformed VPD response, VPD pages probably not supported

That being said, I'm still curious as to why one would think booting from a primary partition would slow down a booting process? I boot from both primary and logical partitions and don't see any relative difference in boot times. Different kernels boot relatively faster or slower, but the same kernel booting the same OS, on either primary or logical partitions gives relatively equal results.