The BIOS is what the hardware is based upon and the testing of a Mother-Board should be started at the BIOS level. The Basic Input Output for today hardware is basically based on USB even for many servers. There are cases which you see a system that CentOS6 was not designed to work with. Not just that but in the level that the engineers designed this MB or it's chips to work with a specific OS or with a specific set of tools. There are other Operation Systems around the work which are not MS or Linux or FreeBSD or Unix. There are custom OS's that do allow other operations and other levels then these. No I do not see them every day but the reason that the Manufacturer is maintaining the Compatibility lists is to let the Desktop or Server Distributer the Benefit of understanding that this piece of software was designed to work with this specific cases. In the case that there is a mismatch between the list and reality the human mind comes in handy. I do really like to buy in stores I know the owner or at-least have good name. The main issue is that one is expecting a set of results while the others do not. When a 200Mhz server was running fine with a Linux kernel it ran fine.. Some people just don't understand what 2.2 Ghz is and what level of complexity we are talking about. (Another squid was compiled safely) How do we test ECC memory? Eliezer On 02/01/14 02:06, John R Pierce wrote: > huh? the BIOS is nearly irrelevant, its code is used for phase 0 > bootstrap only, and other than the ACPI tables that are used to provide > info about power management capabilities. the rest of the BIOS went the > way of MSDOS. > > whats important know is whether or not the RHEL6 package, and by > implication, CentOS6, has out of the box support for all the core IO > devices on the system, its network and storage controllers for a server, > and also audio and graphics for a workstation.