"William A. Mahaffey III" wam@HiWAAY.net wrote:
Since CentOS is based on stable/older code base, and Tyan S2891 is bleeding-edge-new, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work so well. My $0.02 ONLY, no 1st hand experience, YMMV, etc.
The CK04 (nForce4/Pro/etc...) series is not much different than the earlier 02 (nForce2) and 03 (nForce3) series. So basically anything with kernel 2.4.23+ (including backports made to RHEL3 many updates ago) or 2.6.5+ will have _excellent_ support when it comes to I2C, HyperTransport-PCI interconnect, peripherals, etc... In fact, one could argue the best periperal support in Linux "out-of-the-box" these days is on the nForce2/3/4/Pro chipsets.
However, when you start looking at 2-3 on-board HyperTransport tunnels, then you're talking a _lot_ of bridging. E.g., the S2895 has not only the nForce Pro 2200 (with 4 PCIe masters, HT-native GbE and 4 SATA channels, plus the legacy PC), not only the nForce Pro 2050 (with 4 more PCIe masters, another HT-native GbE and 4 more SATA chennls), but also an AMD8131 (dual PCI-X 1.0 channels). That's a _lot_ of busses/peripherals to enumerate!
It's not the immaturity of the components -- it's the sheer number! They _all_ work just fine, because HyperTransport makes it possible. *BUT* automatic identification and enumeration of them all is the issue.