FreeBSD The Power to Serve

FreeBSD/ia64 5.2.1-RELEASE Hardware Notes

The FreeBSD Documentation Project


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 5.2.1-RELEASE on the IA-64 hardware platform (also referred to as FreeBSD/ia64 5.2.1-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:

  • HP zx1 (only on development branch, see the Perforce repository)

  • HP i2000

  • Intel 460GX

  • Intel E8870

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 1.209 2003/12/07 00:54:22 bmah 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: Lists of specific, supported devices are gradually being removed from this document in order to reduce the amount of duplicated (and potentially out-of-date) information contained within. When this process is complete, the manual page for each driver should be consulted for the authoritative list of devices supported that particular driver.


3.1 Disk Controllers

IDE/ATA controllers ( ata(4) driver)

  • Acard ATP850 UDMA2, ATP860 UDMA4, ATP865 UDMA6

  • AMD 756 ATA66, 766 ATA100, 768 ATA100

  • Cenatek Rocket Drive

  • CMD 646, 648 ATA66, and 649 ATA100

  • Cypress 82C693

  • Cyrix 5530 ATA33

  • HighPoint HPT366 ATA66, HPT370 ATA100, HPT372 ATA133, HPT374 ATA133

  • Intel PIIX, PIIX3, PIIX4

  • Intel ICH ATA66, ICH2 ATA100, ICH3 ATA100, ICH4 ATA100

  • nVidia nForce ATA100, nForce2 ATA133

  • Promise ATA100 OEM chip (pdc20265)

  • Promise ATA133 OEM chip (pdc20269)

  • Promise Fasttrak-33, -66, -100, -100 TX2/TX4, -133 TX2/TX2000

  • Promise SATA150 TX2/TX4 Serial ATA/150

  • Promise Ultra-33, -66, -100, -133 TX2/TX2000/TX4000

  • ServerWorks ROSB4 ATA33

  • ServerWorks CSB5 and CSB6 ATA66/ATA100

  • Sil 0680 UDMA6

  • SiS 530, 540, 550, 620

  • SiS 630, 630S, 633, 635, 640, 645, 645DX, 648, 650, 651, 652, 655, 658, 730, 733, 735, 740, 745, 746, 748, 750, 751, 752, 755

  • SiS 5591 ATA100

  • VIA 82C586 ATA33, 82C596 ATA66, 82C686a ATA66, 82C686b ATA100

  • VIA 8233, 8235 ATA133



Qlogic controllers and variants ( isp(4) driver)

LSI Logic Fusion/MP architecture Fiber Channel controllers ( mpt(4) driver)

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:

  • SCSI interface (also includes ProAudio Spectrum and SoundBlaster SCSI) ( cd(4))

  • ATAPI IDE interface ( acd(4))




3.2 Ethernet Interfaces

Intel 82557-, 82258-, 82559-, 82550- or 82562-based Fast Ethernet NICs ( fxp(4) driver)

  • Intel EtherExpress Pro/100B PCI Fast Ethernet

  • Intel InBusiness 10/100 PCI Network Adapter

  • Intel PRO/100+ Management Adapter

  • Intel Pro/100 VE Desktop Adapter

  • Intel Pro/100 M Desktop Adapter

  • Intel Pro/100 S Desktop, Server and Dual-Port Server Adapters

  • On-board Ethernet NICs on many Intel motherboards.



Gigabit Ethernet NICs based on the Broadcom BCM570x ( bge(4) driver)

Gigabit Ethernet NICs based on the Intel 82542 and 82543 controller chips ( gx(4) and em(4) drivers), plus NICs supported by the Intel 82540EM, 82544, 82545EM, and 82546EB controller chips ( em(4) driver only)


3.8 Serial Interfaces

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

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

  • Diva Serial (GSP) Multiport UART (development branch only)




3.11 USB Devices

OHCI 1.0-compliant host controllers ( ohci(4) driver)

UHCI 1.1-compliant host controllers ( uhci(4) driver)

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


3.15 Miscellaneous

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

Note: Information regarding specific video cards and compatibility with XFree86 can be found at http://www.xfree86.org/.



Keyboards including:



Pointing devices including:

  • PS/2 mice and compatible devices, including many laptop pointing devices ( psm(4) driver)

  • Serial mice and compatible devices

Note: moused(8) has more information on using pointing devices with FreeBSD. Information on using pointing devices with XFree86 can be found at http://www.xfree86.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>.




Last modified on: May 15, 2021 by Allan Jude