By Jochen Voss, last updated 2011-08-31
The ASUS A8V is a motherboard for use with 939-pin AMD Athlon 64 processors. This page summarises the Linux support for the board. If you have questions or additional hints, feel free to contact me.
Linux support for the ASUS A8V mainboard is almost perfect. Only a few minor features are not accessible under Linux.
component | hardware identification | status | |
---|---|---|---|
CPU | Socket 939 | works perfectly | |
Memory | 4x 184-pin DDR DIMM | works perfectly | |
SATA | VIA VT6420 | works perfectly (RAID not tested) | |
IDE | VIA VT8237 UDMA133 | works perfectly | |
Ethernet | Marvell 88E8001 10/100/1000Base-T | works perfectly | |
Sound | VIA8237 ALC850 AC97 codec | works sounds a bit cheap |
Table 1. This table summarises the Linux support for the ASUS A8V motherboard.
The features I could not find a trace of under Linux are the advertised
Virtual Cable Tester
and the Audio Sensing and Enumeration
Technology
(whatever this might be). Maybe these are implemented in
software in the windows driver?
A nice feature is that you can update the BIOS from an image file on floppy disk without resorting to any operating system support.
The board is based on a
VIA K8T800Pro chipset.
The on-board devices show up in the lspci
listing as follows:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge 00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge 00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge 00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge 00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge 00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge 00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 South] 00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13) 00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80) 00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86) 00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South] 00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60) 00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 80) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
Figure 1 below shows the rear connector panel of the board.
Figure 1: An annotated photo of the ASUS A8V connector panel. Click on the picture for a higher resolution version.
The on-board sound hardware is supported by the ice1724
ALSA driver. Hints on how to set up and use ALSA can, for example, be
found on my ALSA web page. The device entry in
/proc/asound/cards is
0 [V8237 ]: VIA8237 - VIA 8237 VIA 8237 with ALC850 at 0x1000, irq 21
I only used analog stereo output and the microphone input. Everything I tried seems to work fine.
Copyright © 2011 Jochen Voss. All content on this website (including text, pictures, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.