Tyan Toledo i965R

Back in March we shared with you a preview of the Tyan Toledo i965R motherboard. As we mentioned in the preview, the Toledo i965R features Intel's Q965 Chipset with the ICH8 Southbridge while fitting everything on a FlexATX footprint. We are back today with our compatibility report on the Tyan Toledo i965R as we share how it runs on Fedora 7, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, KateOS 3.6, Solaris Express Nevada, and BeleniX.

Ubuntu:

In our Toledo i965R preview we had mentioned the only Linux distribution tested that had worked out of the box was a beta x86_64 version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. However, when it came to testing the final release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn we had run into a temporary roadblock with both the i386 and x86_64 editions. When starting the desktop LiveCD we had run into a fatal error of "failed to set xfermode". This is a somewhat common occurrence with recent Serial ATA disk controllers, but we were easily able to work around this error by adding irqpoll as a kernel argument when booting the Ubuntu CD. After the irqpoll argument was passed, we had no problems with Ubuntu 7.04. Everything from the dual Gigabit network interfaces to the integrated audio had function as expected -- even after we had installed Ubuntu to one of the hard drives there were no problems.

Fedora:

Similar to the grief we experienced in Ubuntu, we also faced some disk controller issues when booting Fedora 7 Test 4. It had taken Anaconda several minutes to load the Intel ata_piix module, and once it was loaded, it still was unable to locate the ICH8 SATA controller. However, when booting Fedora with the noprobe argument and then manually loading the Intel ATA driver (ata_piix) we were able to install Fedora 7 to the SATA drive without any issues. Passing the all-generic-ide or any other arguments had not worked, but noprobe and then manually loading the driver had done the trick. However, when starting Fedora with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel the system was unable to boot due to kernel errors with accessing the SATA device. We had tried booting with a variety of kernel arguments, but all attempts were unsuccessful in getting Fedora 7 Test 4 to properly start with our system configuration.

Solaris:

For our Solaris compatibility tests we had used Solaris Express Build 63 "Nevada" along with the BeleniX 0.5.1 LiveCD. Solaris Express, Developer Edition had installed to the Serial ATA drive without any problems. However, Solaris was unable to start X.Org with the integrated GMA 3000 (Q965) graphics processor. Outside of X.Org failing, Solaris had no other problems with the Tyan Toledo i965R. When booting BeleniX 0.5.1 we had no problems and the LiveCD had successfully booted along with support for the integrated Gigabit networking and graphics.

Kate OS:

When booting a beta copy of KateOS 3.6 LiveCD we were presented with the following message: "Fatal error occurred - Data for Kate OS LIVE not found". Like Ubuntu and Fedora, Kate OS also had problems with the Q965 + ICH8 Chipset and its disk controller.

While the Tyan Toledo i965R had a few problems with the Serial ATA controller, we were able to get the motherboard working with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Fedora 7 Test 4 had also installed, but was unable to boot due to SATA problems with the kernel. As we had mentioned when looking at the Abit AB9 motherboard, a number of recent Intel motherboards have had SATA disk controller issues. All of these issues will likely be worked out in the very near future in the most up to date distributions, but in the mean time, you may want to postpone your purchase or use Ubuntu or another distribution that does not posses these issues. We will continue to update the status of the Tyan Toledo i965R motherboard in future Phoronix articles as well as on the Phoronix Forums. Tyan has done a nice job engineering this FlexATX motherboard and we have no problems with it outside of the Linux disk controller bug. Benchmarks using the Tyan Toledo i965R motherboard can be found in Intel Q965 Graphics Performance article along with use in some other upcoming reviews.