--- title: "FreeBSD/powerpc 6.4-RELEASE Hardware Notes" sidenav: download --- ++++

The FreeBSD Documentation Project


Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Supported Processors and Motherboards
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.


1 Introduction

This document contains the hardware compatibility notes for FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE on the PowerPC hardware platform (also referred to as FreeBSD/powerpc 6.4-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 PowerPC hardware platform. Versions of the hardware compatibility notes for other architectures will differ in some details.


2 Supported Processors and Motherboards

The information for this paragraph has yet to be compiled.


3 Supported Devices

$FreeBSD: releng/6.4/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/hardware/common/dev.sgml 174714 2007-12-17 12:22:05Z bmah $

This section describes the devices currently known to be supported by with FreeBSD on the PowerPC 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

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

Controllers supported by the amr(4) driver include:

Cards supported by the isp(4) driver include:

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

The Ultra 320 SCSI controller chips supported by the mpt(4) driver can be found onboard on many systems including:

These systems also contain Integrated Raid Mirroring and Integrated Raid Mirroring Enhanced which this driver also supports. The SAS controller chips are also present on many new AMD/Opteron based systems, like the Sun 4100. Note that this controller can drive both SAS and SATA drives or a mix of them at the same time. The Integrated Raid Mirroring available for these controllers is poorly supported at best. The Fibre Channel controller chipset are supported by a broad variety of speeds and systems. The Apple Fibre Channel HBA is in fact the FC949ES card. This driver also supports target mode for Fibre Channel cards. This support may be enabled by setting the desired role of the core via the LSI Logic firmware utility that establishes what roles the card can take on - no separate compilation is required.

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 axe(4) driver supports ASIX Electronics AX88172 based USB Ethernet adapters including:

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 fxp(4) driver include:

Chips supported by the gem(4) driver include:

The following add-on cards are known to work with the gem(4) driver at this time:

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 re(4) driver supports RealTek RTL8139C+, RTL8169, RTL816xS, RTL811xS, and RTL8101E based Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet adapters including:

Adapters supported by the rl(4) driver include:

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

[i386, amd64] Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 MiniPCI network adapter ( ipw(4) driver)

[i386, amd64] Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2915ABG MiniPCI and 2225BG PCI network adapters ( iwi(4) driver)


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

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

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

The following devices are supported by the urio(4) driver:

The ulpt(4) driver provides support for USB printers and parallel printer conversion cables, including the following:

The umct(4) driver supports the following adapters:

Because there is no standard device class for USB scanners, this driver will only recognise devices whose USB IDs are explicitly listed in the table in the driver itself. The following devices are supported to date:

The umass(4) driver supports USB Mass Storage devices, including:

Among the supported digital cameras are:


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


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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