--- title: "FreeBSD/ia64 6.0-RELEASE Hardware Notes" sidenav: download --- ++++

The FreeBSD Documentation Project


Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Supported Processors and Motherboards
2.1 Supported Devices Overview
3 Supported Devices
3.1 Disk Controllers
3.2 Ethernet Interfaces
3.3 Token Ring Interfaces
3.4 FDDI Interfaces
3.5 ATM Interfaces
3.6 Wireless Network Interfaces
3.7 Miscellaneous Networks
3.8 ISDN Interfaces
3.9 Serial Interfaces
3.10 Sound Devices
3.11 Camera and Video Capture Devices
3.12 USB Devices
3.13 IEEE 1394 (Firewire) Devices
3.14 Bluetooth Devices
3.15 Cryptographic Accelerators
3.16 Miscellaneous

This is a preliminary document. It is incomplete, and in need of additional content. Please send additional information on IA-64 processors, motherboards, and various devices working on FreeBSD to the FreeBSD IA64 porting mailing list.


1 Introduction

This document contains the hardware compatibility notes for FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE on the IA-64 hardware platform (also referred to as FreeBSD/ia64 6.0-RELEASE). It lists devices known to work on this platform, as well as some notes on boot-time kernel customization that may be useful when attempting to configure support for new devices.

Note: This document includes information specific to the IA-64 hardware platform. Versions of the hardware compatibility notes for other architectures will differ in some details.

More information on FreeBSD/ia64 is contained on the FreeBSD/ia64 Project page.


2 Supported Processors and Motherboards

Currently supported processors are the Itanium and the Itanium 2.

Supported chipsets include:

Both Uniprocessor (UP) and Symmetric Multi-processor (SMP) configurations are under active development. At this time, SMP-enabled systems are considered less stable. The current priorities are UP fixes to improve stability.


2.1 Supported Devices Overview

This section contains additional information about what devices may or may not be supported by FreeBSD/ia64.

Except for the PC chipset embedded ata(4) controllers, most should work out of the box. Eventually, all ia64-compatible ATA controllers are expected to be fully supported. Refer to the following sections for various disk controllers and their current status.

In general, “PC standard” serial ports supported by the sio(4) driver are expected to work on Intel legacy machines, but not PA legacy machines. The reason is that all devices on HP machines are memory-mapped and there is no ISA device support other than the PCI dictated VGA legacy.

In addition to sio(4) devices, the following devices fail on non-Intel legacy machines (but should work on boxes with an Intel legacy) because their drivers make ISA-specific assumptions that do not hold:

sio(4) No support for memory-mapped I/O
syscons(4) Expect BIOS, VGA probes, etc.
pcm(4) Probes MSS ISA ports ad nauseum
atkbd(4), psm(4) Fixed ISA port locations

3 Supported Devices

$FreeBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/hardware/common/dev.sgml,v 1.282.2.3 2005/09/24 10:46:38 brueffer Exp $

This section describes the devices currently known to be supported by with FreeBSD on the IA-64 platform. Other configurations may also work, but simply have not been tested yet. Feedback, updates, and corrections to this list are encouraged.

Where possible, the drivers applicable to each device or class of devices is listed. If the driver in question has a manual page in the FreeBSD base distribution (most should), it is referenced here. Information on specific models of supported devices, controllers, etc. can be found in the manual pages.

Note: The device lists in this document are being generated automatically from FreeBSD manual pages. This means that some devices, which are supported by multiple drivers, may appear multiple times.


3.1 Disk Controllers

IDE/ATA controllers ( ata(4) driver)

Controllers supported by the aac(4) driver include:

The ahc(4) driver supports the following SCSI host adapter chips and SCSI controller cards:

The ahd(4) driver supports the following:

Controllers supported by the amr(4) driver include:

Controllers supported by the ciss(4) driver include:

The dpt(4) driver provides support for the following RAID adapters:

Controllers supported by the iir(4) driver include:

The SRCU31 and SRCU31L can be updated via a firmware update available from Intel.

Cards supported by the isp(4) driver include:

Controllers supported by the mlx(4) driver include:

All major firmware revisions (2.x, 3.x, 4.x and 5.x) are supported, however it is always advisable to upgrade to the most recent firmware available for the controller. Compatible Mylex controllers not listed should work, but have not been verified.

Controllers supported by the mly(4) driver include:

Compatible Mylex controllers not listed should work, but have not been verified.

The following controllers are supported by the mpt(4) driver:

The SCSI controller chips supported by the mpt(4) driver can be found onboard on many systems including:

The sym(4) driver provides support for the following Symbios/LSI Logic PCI SCSI controllers:

The SCSI controllers supported by sym(4) can be either embedded on a motherboard, or on one of the following add-on boards:

With all supported SCSI controllers, full support is provided for SCSI-I, SCSI-II, and SCSI-III peripherals, including hard disks, optical disks, tape drives (including DAT, 8mm Exabyte, Mammoth, and DLT), medium changers, processor target devices and CD-ROM drives. WORM devices that support CD-ROM commands are supported for read-only access by the CD-ROM drivers (such as cd(4)). WORM/CD-R/CD-RW writing support is provided by cdrecord(1), which is a part of the sysutils/cdrtools port in the Ports Collection.

The following CD-ROM type systems are supported at this time:




3.2 Ethernet Interfaces

Adapters supported by the aue(4) driver include:

The bge(4) driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom BCM570x family of Gigabit Ethernet controller chips, including the following:

The cue(4) driver supports CATC USB-EL1210A based USB Ethernet adapters including:

The dc(4) driver provides support for the following chipsets:

The following NICs are known to work with the dc(4) driver at this time:

Adapters supported by the de(4) driver include:

The em(4) driver supports Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Intel 82540, 82541ER, 82541PI, 82542, 82543, 82544, 82545, 82546, 82546EB, 82546GB, 82547 and 82573 controller chips:

Adapters supported by the fxp(4) driver include:

The hme(4) driver supports the on-board Ethernet interfaces of many Sun UltraSPARC workstation and server models. Cards supported by the hme(4) driver include:

The kue(4) driver supports Kawasaki LSI KL5KLUSB101B based USB Ethernet adapters including:

The pcn(4) driver supports adapters and embedded controllers based on the AMD PCnet/FAST, PCnet/FAST+, PCnet/FAST III, PCnet/PRO and PCnet/Home Fast Ethernet chips:

The re(4) driver supports RealTek RTL8139C+, RTL8169, RTL8169S and RTL8110S based Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet adapters including:

Adapters supported by the rl(4) driver include:

Adapters supported by the sf(4) driver include:

The sis(4) driver supports Silicon Integrated Systems SiS 900 and SiS 7016 based Fast Ethernet adapters and embedded controllers, as well as Fast Ethernet adapters based on the National Semiconductor DP83815 (MacPhyter) chip. Supported adapters include:

The txp(4) driver supports the following cards:

The vx(4) driver supports the following cards:

The xl(4) driver supports the following hardware:

Both the 3C656 family of CardBus cards and the 3C556 family of MiniPCI cards have a built-in proprietary modem. Neither the xl(4) driver nor any other driver supports this modem.


3.3 Token Ring Interfaces


3.4 FDDI Interfaces


3.5 ATM Interfaces


3.6 Wireless Network Interfaces


3.7 Miscellaneous Networks


3.8 ISDN Interfaces


3.9 Serial Interfaces

“PC standard” 8250, 16450, and 16550-based serial ports ( sio(4) driver)

PCI-Based multi-port serial boards ( puc(4) driver)




3.10 Sound Devices


3.11 Camera and Video Capture Devices


3.12 USB Devices

The ohci(4) driver supports all OHCI v1.0 compliant controllers including:

The uhci(4) driver supports all UHCI v1.1 compliant controllers including:

USB 2.0 controllers using the EHCI interface ( ehci(4) driver)

The umct(4) driver supports the following adapters:


3.13 IEEE 1394 (Firewire) Devices

The fwohci(4) driver provides support for PCI/CardBus FireWire interface cards. The driver supports the following IEEE 1394 OHCI chipsets:


3.14 Bluetooth Devices


3.15 Cryptographic Accelerators


3.16 Miscellaneous

VGA-compatible video cards ( vga(4) driver)

Note: Information regarding specific video cards and compatibility with Xorg can be found at http://www.x.org/.



Keyboards including:



Pointing devices including:

Note: moused(8) has more information on using pointing devices with FreeBSD. Information on using pointing devices with Xorg can be found at http://www.x.org/.




This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.

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