So, my company finally purchased some new Dell machines to replace our aging FreeBSD workstations for the programmers. After a long period of research, digging through man pages, HOWTOs, HCLs and even source code, I decided that the GX270 machines were our best bet for FreeBSD support (even if we had to drop an off-board AGP video card in). They use the Intel 865G chipset, which seems to have support for everything in recent FreeBSD source.
When the machines showed up, I unpacked the first one, turned it on (taking care to document the startup procedure and how I did NOT accept the "press any key-through" license) and loaded my standard FreeBSD release on it (4.8-STABLE copied from my master workstation). No agp support and no ethernet (although I could load a module for this).
This board has an Intel gigabit NIC built into the motherboard. It's device 'em' identified with
Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection, Version - 1.6.6This works perfectly as far back as FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE.
The 865G chipset also contains integrated "Intel Extreame Graphics 2", which is supported by XFree86 4.3.0 with the "i810" driver. Unfortunately, the OS must have "agpgart" support for this video chip to work. 4.8-STABLE (as of July 16, my release date) didn't support agp on this board. However, a simple update to 4.9-PRERELEASE did the trick and a very pleasant
agp0: <Intel 82865G (865G GMCH) SVGA controller>scrolled by my boot messages.
Here's my final kernel config for this machine:
machine i386 cpu I686_CPU ident OPTIPLEX maxusers 0 options INET #InterNETworking options FFS #Berkeley Fast Filesystem options FFS_ROOT #FFS usable as root device [keep this!] options SOFTUPDATES #Enable FFS soft updates support options NFS #Network Filesystem options MSDOSFS #MSDOS Filesystem options CD9660 #ISO 9660 Filesystem options PROCFS #Process filesystem options COMPAT_43 #Compatible with BSD 4.3 [KEEP THIS!] options UCONSOLE #Allow users to grab the console options USERCONFIG #boot -c editor options VISUAL_USERCONFIG #visual boot -c editor options KTRACE #ktrace(1) support options SYSVSHM #SYSV-style shared memory options SYSVMSG #SYSV-style message queues options SYSVSEM #SYSV-style semaphores options P1003_1B #Posix P1003_1B real-time extensions options _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING options ICMP_BANDLIM #Rate limit bad replies options KBD_INSTALL_CDEV # install a CDEV entry in /dev options USER_LDT #allow user-level control of i386 ldt options INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE # include config in kernel device isa device pci # Floppy drives device fdc0 at isa? port IO_FD1 irq 6 drq 2 device fd0 at fdc0 drive 0 # ATA and ATAPI devices device ata device atadisk # ATA disk drives device atapicd # ATAPI CDROM drives options ATA_STATIC_ID #Static device numbering # SCSI peripherals # No SCSI controllers in machine, but leave these in for USB disks device scbus # SCSI bus (required) device da # Direct Access (disks) device sa # Sequential Access (tape etc) device cd # CD device pass # Passthrough device (direct SCSI access) # atkbdc0 controls both the keyboard and the PS/2 mouse device atkbdc0 at isa? port IO_KBD device atkbd0 at atkbdc? irq 1 flags 0x1 device psm0 at atkbdc? irq 12 device vga0 at isa? # splash screen/screen saver pseudo-device splash # syscons is the default console driver, resembling an SCO console device sc0 at isa? flags 0x100 # Floating point support - do not disable. device npx0 at nexus? port IO_NPX irq 13 # Power management support (see LINT for more options) device apm0 at nexus? disable flags 0x20 # Advanced Power Management # Serial (COM) ports device sio0 at isa? port IO_COM1 flags 0x10 irq 4 device sio1 at isa? port IO_COM2 irq 3 device agp # Gigabit Ethernet NICs. device em # Intel Pro/1000 (82542,82543,82544,82540) # Pseudo devices - the number indicates how many units to allocated. pseudo-device loop # Network loopback pseudo-device ether # Ethernet support pseudo-device pty # Pseudo-ttys (telnet etc) # The `bpf' pseudo-device enables the Berkeley Packet Filter. # Be aware of the administrative consequences of enabling this! pseudo-device bpf #Berkeley packet filter device pcm # sound # USB support device uhci # UHCI PCI->USB interface device ohci # OHCI PCI->USB interface device usb # USB Bus (required) device ugen # Generic device uhid # "Human Interface Devices" device ukbd # Keyboard device ulpt # Printer device umass # Disks/Mass storage - Requires scbus and da device ums # Mouse device uscanner # Scanners