# Status of Nforce2 support in linux?

## Jevin Sweval

I'm going to buy a new motherboard very soon and I'd like to know the status of different chipsets supporting AthlonXP cpus in linux. I heard the nforce2 chipset rocks in windows, but how is it under linux? Heard a few bad things about it   :Confused: 

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## DarkBlackFox

It depends on how far in-depth you wish to go as far as linux functionality and installation.  It also depends on your exact hardware configuration.  I, for example, use an MSI K7N2G nforce 2 based board with a Radeon 9700.  Took a little extra configuration, but I have everything running, from the serial ATA to AGPGART and back again.  Granted, with an ATI card I don't see as high performance as I've seen others report with nVidia cards and associated drivers, but it's still perfectly acceptable for me, playing games in WineX, general browsing and the like.  

I'd guess the short answer is while the nforce 2 platform isn't completely/flawlessly supported as of yet, most of it will work fine, and given proper time and patience, it can do a pretty dern good job of holding up as a stable and high performing system.

I'm going to guess the few bad things you heard about it were from people unwilling to put the time and patience into researching solutions to some of the problems that come up.  While I have had my difficulties with the configuration of Gentoo, I pulled through and now enjoy the full benefits of what Gentoo has to offer with it's from scratch approach in that I've migrated to Gentoo from Mandrake 9.1, and the performance increase is exceptional.  The system overall is much more responsive and has a much nicer feel to it.[/i]

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## cato`

I too got a MSI K7N2 card, and it works!   :Laughing: 

I've seen some ppl with Epox cards that got some problems thou....

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## jpc82

I bought the Abit NF7-S about a week ago, and so far I have everything working fine except for AGPGART and my ATI 9500pro.  I'm working on it but I've been busy with work.

Overall this board is great, and I'm happy I went with the nForce2 board.

The one thing I hate about the board is that currently this Audio drivers do not support hardware mixing, so I think I will just use my SB Live Value until the drivers get support.

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## moby dick

Hi Jevin,

I am the half-proud owner of on EPoX 8RDA+ board with the nforce2 chipset. But why am I only a half-proud owner?

Well that's easy to explain.

In window$ the board rocks and is wonderfull  :Razz:   - but it's windo$.  :Evil or Very Mad: 

In gentoo the board works  :Razz:   - but it was long, hard way.  :Embarassed: 

Allright everybody out there - you CAN call me quitter and YES I had some problems to get the board running  :Rolling Eyes:  . Ey but not everone is a nerd and there ARE people having problems with gentoo.  :Laughing: 

So here are the hard facts:

- try at least the gentoo-2.4.21_rc6 kernel (which has some nforce2 support)

- you have to emerge the network drivers after each rebuild of the kernel

- you habe to use the i810_audio drivers to get some noise out of the speakers

- if you have a nvidia videocard the trouble continues (you have to find a working version of the nvidia-kernel and nvidia.glx ebuilds

In the meantime my systems runs like hell and all drivers work fine.

But in the time right after I bought the board there were frequent updates and changes in all possible drivers. So it may be that they are just working now  :Razz:  .

One last advise: YOU HAVE TO TRY - 'cause the chipset itself is fine.

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## jpc82

I use the gs-sources from the tree, and they have nforce2 chipset support also

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## DarkBlackFox

 *moby dick wrote:*   

> Hi Jevin,
> 
> So here are the hard facts:
> 
> - try at least the gentoo-2.4.21_rc6 kernel (which has some nforce2 support)
> ...

 

I'm using the standard gentoo-sources kernel (2.4.20) and have everything running no problem.  The trick is to manually get the nvidia drivers, not emerge them- for when you make/make install them from the original tar, it will copy the AGPGART patch to /usr/src/nvidia/nvgart/linux-2.4.20-agpgart.diff, which works out wonderfully with the gentoo 2.4.20 kernel.  I used lynx to obtain the patch and applied before the first compilation of the kernel (during gentoo install, when the nvnet module works), then set the agpgart module to load on startup, and haven't had to do anything involving agp since.  Then I emerged the ati-drivers, ran fglrxconfig, chose to NOT use the internal agpgart (use the external kernel agpgart), set module fglrx to load on startup, and X fires up with good enoughl 3d acceleration on my 9700.  

Regarding onboard audio I can't say much, I've had an Audigy for longer than I've had this board, so i have onboard audio disabled and use the emu10k1 alsa drivers.

As for having to re-emerge the nvnet drivers- if you use the original tar, after you recompile the kernel, just go to the directory you extracted the drivers to, and do "make install".  The drivers are already compiled, so all you really need is to recopy the modules back into the modules directory.  Saves a bit of time, and you don't even need a reboot afterwards- just do "insmod nvnet".

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## moby dick

 *DarkBlackFox wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Then I emerged the ati-drivers, ran fglrxconfig, chose to NOT use the internal agpgart (use the external kernel agpgart), set module fglrx to load on startup, and X fires up with good enoughl 3d acceleration on my 9700.  
> 
> 

 

That may work with ATI cards  :Laughing:  . But if you have to use NVIDIA card, you need the special nvidia drivers (nvidia-kernel, nvidia-glx)

The kernel gs-2.4.21_rc8 comes along with nvidia AGPGART support, but it has a poor performance compared to the nvidia-drivers (only about 2/3 )  :Sad:  .

 *DarkBlackFox wrote:*   

> 
> 
> As for having to re-emerge the nvnet drivers- if you use the original tar, after you recompile the kernel, just go to the directory you extracted the drivers to, and do "make install". The drivers are already compiled, so all you really need is to recopy the modules back into the modules directory. Saves a bit of time, and you don't even need a reboot afterwards- just do "insmod nvnet".
> 
> 

 

emerge does exactly the same - it's just copying the (already compiled) files to the right place. After that the insmod works too without reboot.  :Smile: 

And if you do a

```

/etc/init.d/net.eth0 start

```

you can even use the NIC without reboot.  :Razz: 

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## WarpFlyght

I've got an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (revision 1.1 I believe...) and had no overly troubling issues with it. The Gentoo installation went just as smoothly as it did on my other machines, although I have yet to get the framebuffer to function (and it worked with an identical hardware complement on a motherboard with a VIA KT333 chipset), but I stopped working at it a month or so ago. Word has it that new nVidia drivers will allow us to get more use out of many of the nForce2's functions, provided we're willing to taint our kernels. I haven't tried them yet, because I've been too busy getting all of my hardware working on my laptop.

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## Freak_NL

This may seem like a silly question, but I'm about to replace a Celeron 1.3 and its motherboard with an Asus A7N8X-X with an AthlonXP 2600+.

My current Gentoo is compiled with -march=pentium3 flags. Does the AthlonXP support those? Of course I will reemerge world with -march=athlonxp (if it exists), but is the current system still "valid" on the new CPU?

(the kernel will be recompiled first ofcourse)

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## IceShadow22

I just installed gentoo as well and the only thing I can't get up is the ethernet driver.  Every time I try to start it up i get nada.  It actually kills my system and makes the whole linux system lock.  I can't even kill the operation  ;-;   Any ideas?

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## Tiny_Guy

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> My current Gentoo is compiled with -march=pentium3 flags. Does the AthlonXP support those? Of course I will reemerge world with -march=athlonxp (if it exists), but is the current system still "valid" on the new CPU?
> 
> 

 

The AthlonXP cflags for -march is athlon-xp, which is what I have.

Nforce2 is awesome.

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## drekka

Hi,

System:

Asus A7N8X mobo (Sil3112 SATA Raid controller, nForce NIC, 3Com NIC)

Hercules Prophet 9700Pro video card

2 x Seagate 120G SATA drives in raid 0 config.

Everything is working just fine using the ac sources. I spent most of my time installing just inderstanding what I did and didn't need (i'm still a newbie  :Wink: , but once I worked it all out the hardware works just fine. I haven't had to add anything extra or do any weird config stuff.

 :Very Happy: 

Derek

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## Deawin

Anyone got the NForce2 chipset running with a late 2.5.* or 2.6.0_test1 kernel? 

I have to boot with acpi=off, else USB won't work at all and ALSA drivers for SB Live just Ooops. And even if I completely turn acpi off I get random lockups (~5 minutes, sometimes more) and have problems with USB (can't unload ohci_hcd or ehci_hcd -> Ooops). I won't even speak about my USB Speedtouch modem yet...

Anyone got more luck yet?

Markus

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## ()

I got the 2.6 kernel running with an Asus A7N8X mobo, without problems to speak of. I haven't tried enabling ACPI for a while, since the inbuilt 3Com seemed to dislike it (this was with 2.4 kernel). Alsa works reasonably good, for my main soundcard I compile as module, the integrated nVidia chip doesnt make any noise at all (I've unmuted with alsamixer). Perhaps I'm doing something wrong since I can't get output from integrated sound, dunno.

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## SrConchiwa

I have a k7n2 delta board and I was curious if all you k7n2ers out there were able to get SATA working, and if so what driver did you use (?!!).

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## Odin

Its probably the siimage driver. Almost every nforce2 with SATA uses the Silicon Image chip...

Its in ac-sources, gs-sources, dev-sources, and probably more, those are just the ones I've used.

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## SrConchiwa

I am one of the poor suckers who has a Promise "we don't share" PDC 20376 FastTrak S150 TX2plus.

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## Deawin

Patching 2.6.0-test1 to -ac2 solved all my USB and alsa problems and it's running stable as well  :Smile: 

Markus

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## DntKnwHw

hi people got a problem using k7n2 -ilsr, got a kernel panic, everytime i install it. then i found this thread, 

i already install gentoo on my p3 computer but this time im going to install it to my athlon xp, but no luck i can make a good install, so anyone who can help me. i mean additional instructions to follow beside from the online manual, files to download? etc, everything needed just to make this thing work

i have a gentoo 1.4 - GRP for xp

athlon xp, msi k7n2, radeon 9500,Last edited by DntKnwHw on Wed Oct 08, 2003 5:37 am; edited 1 time in total

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## GentooBox

Hi there..

I really like the 2.6 kernel, and i have the kernel running on every box i have .  :Smile: 

but i cant use the 2.6 kernel on the box i'm writeing from now. cuz nforce-net dosent work in 2.6.

i have a MSI K7N2 Delta... and i try' ed the 2.6 patch for nforce-net, but it gives me some weird IRQ errors.

- maby someone could give me a link to the patch ?

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