Encountered some frustrating hardware conflicts when adding extra i/o cards to the RX2600, but eventually deduced that the ‘management board’ was causing these, and so disconnected it.

I manage to find a low-cost Adaptec SATA board for PCIX, and also a PCIX-to-PCI-Express converter, which enabled me to add USB3 connectivity, which AFAIK was never available on a PCIX board..   I never managed to get the AGP/PCIX combo to work, and so stayed with the all-PCIX connector board, and managed to get KDE working successfully, using the old Fedora 9 nv driver..

[root@rgia64 ~]# lspci
00:01.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
00:01.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
00:01.2 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 02)
00:02.0 IDE interface: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 0649 Ultra ATA/100 PCI to ATA Host Controller (rev 02)
00:03.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 0d)
20:01.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 07)
20:01.1 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 07)
20:02.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5701 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 15)
40:01.0 PCI bridge: PLX Technology, Inc. PEX 8114 PCI Express-to-PCI/PCI-X Bridge (rev bd)
41:00.0 USB Controller: Renesas Technology Corp. Unknown device 0015 (rev 02)
60:01.0 RAID bus controller: Adaptec AAC-RAID (rev 01)
80:01.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34GL [Quadro NVS 280 PCI] (rev a1)

I am guessing that the USB3 card (Renesas..) shows up as ‘unknown device’ as Fedora 9’s version of the USB subsystem is not yet capable of recognising it..?

I discovered that Gentoo Linux still had a – relatively – up-to-date IA64 version of their Distro, and more details are here:  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:IA64 .   I tried their ‘latest’ boot CD, but it failed to be recognised, and I found a forum post that mentioned that the last ‘working’ version of this was from 2016, but that is something I can work with, as it includes a 4.x kernel, and there is a more recent (December 2017) equivalent of a rootfs fileset (‘stage3…’) available..     I am by no means an expert on Gentoo, having used Red Hat – later Fedora – since 1997(!), so this will be a useful learning exercise.   More on this later…

I also understand that Debian are planning to revive their IA64 project (see comments below my original article – http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2111 )

Robert Gadsdon December 17, 2017.