Running Debian on the Elite Group ECS 7610

Introduction

If there was an award for the worst motherboard known to man this would have been a worthy contender. The list of stuff that is broken and does not work on this motherboard is clearly longer than the list of what works. I am saying this based on testing more than one motherboard with different BIOS revisions obtained from different suppliers so it is no as I have happened to be stuffed with a single defective one.

• Broken ACPI. The ACPI implementation reports S3 and S4 available. The motherboard however when instructed to enter S3 (suspend to RAM) or S4 (suspend to disk) goes into S1 - standby, continues to consume as much power as it used and generate the same amount of noise. To add insult to injury after that it fails to wake up. If the problem is reported to ECS you get a sequence of idiotic messages telling you to toggle fields that do not exist in the BIOS. They do their best to fake "supporting" you while stalling for time.
• Broken Video. SiS? video adapters have been degenerating from bad to worse for a considerable amount of time. This one however is a pinnacle of SiS? degeneration. If initialised in 24 bit colour the screen is covered in white stripes, memory refresh on the motherboard gets screwed up and the whole system shuts down in a way where it can be restarted only from the socket.
• ACPI interrupt routing functions sometimes cause the machine to hang. When initialising devices the kernel sometimes hangs. Relying on this motherboard to boot cleanly is a very optimistic endeavour. It requires roughly the same level of eternal optimism required to try to sail across the Atlantic in an Optimist class sailboat.
• The onboard Ethernet is broken in all linux kernels I have tried so far. Some people have managed to get it to work. I have not had the patience so far so on both MBs I have I am using an add-on PCI Ethernet instead.
• The onboard SATA is incompatible with some devices. For example iOmega Rev does not work on it constantly throwing errors. All disks I have tested so far work, but that is no guarantee as the test sample used was fairly small.

This motherboard has only one redeeming feature - it is nearly free. It is bundled with recent AMD socket 754 CPUs (the new sub-40W parts) with the overall bundle cost nearly equal to the CPU boxed retail cost. I have to admit - I fell for it. So now I am stuck with two examples of this fantastic high quality hardware obtained for circa 40 quid each and each has required an add-on PCI ethernet and an add-on PCI-E video which by far exceed the MB+CPU cost.

Getting it to work with Linux

As the ethernet does not work with Debian the only way of booting this wonderful example of South-East asian hardware and software engineering is to use a local disc or a USB key. It boots in about 90% of the cases. In the remaining 10% it hangs when loading modules and routing interrupts for the devices present.

This is the result of lspci once booted with a PCI-E Asus Nvidia and PCI 3Com Ethernet:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 761/M761 Host (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS965 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 48)
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)
00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Sound Controller (rev a0)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 190 Ethernet Adapter
00:06.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:08.0 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Device 0183 (rev 01)
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
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
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44 [GeForce 6200 LE] (rev a1)

Power Management

As mentioned above ACPI S3 and S4 are broken. This leaves CPU throttle as the only reasonable means of decreasing the power bill. This is one of the few things that work. It produces very good results when used with the recent Socket 754 Athlon 64s bundled with this motherboard. If CPU frequency is used for idle, the idle power consumption when used with the usual 2200 MHz (3200+ in AMD marketspeak) Athlon 64 bundle can be under 40W (with a good power supply).

However, even that is not what I needed as the system does not go into suspend to ram mode when not in use. Bummer...