# Do not buy asrock intel motherboards for FreeBSD



## BsDjUsTbSd (Jun 29, 2020)

Hello,

I have seen many people with asrock mobos specifically having usb problems with keyboard typing weird keys at startup and needing to plug it in and out
I have also seen people with asrock mobos having problems with solaris 11.4 install hanging because of usb being weird in asrock motherboards
I have also seen people with asrock mobos having problems with hackintosh and needibg special kernel extensions(kexts) ONLY for asrock mobos
and way more problems..

so if you want to NOT have weird usbs do NOT buy asrock mobos


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## obsigna (Jun 29, 2020)

Is this about second hand experience?

I have running FreeBSD 12.1 on an ASRock B250M Pro4 equipped with an i7 7700 @ 4.2 GHz + 16 GB of RAM and everything works perfectly well, and I am quite satisfied.


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## Mjölnir (Jun 29, 2020)

In other realms than computer business, some lawyers make a living by writing _dissuasions_, to urge companies to sign a _letter of omission_ regarding some behaviour, e.g. desceptive advertising.
While in general I do not like their business model, sometimes I'd like to see some of these guys to specialize in computer hardware stuff and kick those companies in their _Allerwertester_ to better comply with standards.


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## SirDice (Jun 29, 2020)

BsDjUsTbSd said:


> I have seen many people with asrock mobos specifically having usb problems


If you search for specific problems, you're going to find specific problems. It's called confirmation bias. People that don't have problems generally don't post about it on the internet.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 29, 2020)

Shitty bios can be found in many computers, including HP.
In fact they try does it install Windows , OK , lets sell this.


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## shkhln (Jun 29, 2020)

Afaik, Asus/ASRock/Gigabyte/MSI stay roughly on the same quality level. Whether you'll have any issues with them mostly depends on your luck.


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## shkhln (Jun 29, 2020)

Also, what is this "Solaris 11.4" you are talking about?


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## Datapanic (Jun 29, 2020)

I don't know, I have an E3C23XD2I and an E3C226D2I both running FreeBSD and they work great.


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## Mjölnir (Jun 29, 2020)

shkhln said:


> Also, what is this "Solaris 11.4" you are talking about?


Solaris, formerly Sun now Oracle OS (turns your laptop into a mainframe )


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## tingo (Jun 29, 2020)

FWIW, I have several ASRock computers, and several ASRock motherboards, they run FreeBSD just fine.


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## Lamia (Jun 30, 2020)

tingo said:


> FWIW, I have several ASRock computers, and several ASRock motherboards, they run FreeBSD just fine.


Gigabytes Mobo has been doing fine here too. But I wonder what is the maker of Mobo in Acer laptops 
Looks like all the makers with their names starting with the letter 'A' are dodgy. 
Reminds me of the Akai/Aiwa era. Aiwa was awesome then. And Akai comes way below it.


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## Datapanic (Jun 30, 2020)

Lamia said:


> Gigabytes Mobo has been doing fine here too. But I wonder what is the maker of Mobo in Acer laptops
> Looks like all the makers with their names starting with the letter 'A' are dodgy.
> Reminds me of the Akai/Aiwa era. Aiwa was awesome then. And Akai comes way below it.


Now wait a minute!  Akai made great audio products back in the 70's.  Why, I still have my Akai reel-to-reel and it works great!  Aiwa was okay too, but I just trashed my Aiwa 150 powered active subwoofer because the speaker rubber wore out.  I kinda think Aiwa came way after the greatness of Akai.


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## zirias@ (Jun 30, 2020)

tingo said:


> FWIW, I have several ASRock computers, and several ASRock motherboards, they run FreeBSD just fine.


Same here. And my server board is an ASRock Rack model...  USB works fine, I'm using an external USB harddisk for backup of my zpool.


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## Lamia (Jun 30, 2020)

Datapanic said:


> Now wait a minute!  Akai made great audio products back in the 70's.  Why, I still have my Akai reel-to-reel and it works great!  Aiwa was okay too, but I just trashed my Aiwa 150 powered active subwoofer because the speaker rubber wore out.  I kinda think Aiwa came way after the greatness of Akai.


Aiwa used to make more complex and robust systems. You said the rubber wore out. That is what usually happens. Their electronic circuits mostly remain intact. There can be a few problems with the mechanisms though after some time. Akai products do not usually have that level of sophistication; yet they withstand the test of time too.


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## BsDjUsTbSd (Jun 30, 2020)

shkhln said:


> Also, what is this "Solaris 11.4" you are talking about?


oracle makes their own unix system V called solaris(it's current version is 11.4)
it is free for personal use and you can download over at oracle.com/solaris
note:you need license for commercial use


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 30, 2020)

zfs , virtualbox. On database level many persons like it. But it became a "niche" ?


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## Lamia (Jun 30, 2020)

Alain De Vos said:


> zfs , virtualbox. On database level many persons like it. But it became a "niche" ?



If I understand what you meant, you are asking if the two technologies/tools are now in a field of its own. I can confirm that ZFS rocks.  I would want to try other emerging filesystems like glusterfs. But there is no use case for them now. UFS and likes don't rock well for recent releases of Unix(FBSD). And I am also hearing Linux users switching to ZFS.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jun 30, 2020)

MSI z240-A-pro Intel board works perfectly with FreeBSD. The EFI is a little jacked up (non standard?) and I have to run through the procedure on the FreeBSD UEFI wiki to get it to boot, but after that, smooth sailing.


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## shkhln (Jun 30, 2020)

BsDjUsTbSd said:


> oracle makes their own unix system V called solaris(it's current version is 11.4)



I'm just surprised anyone would try whatever left of Solaris after Illumos split off. Especially since it doesn't really target desktops and consumer hardware.


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## msplsh (Jun 30, 2020)

Oh no, my Ryzen ZFS server is dooomed.

Sorry, none of these anecdotes contain FreeBSD.


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## a6h (Jun 30, 2020)

shkhln said:


> Especially since it doesn't really target desktops and consumer hardware


And _Solaris installation program_ was creepy.


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## Jose (Jun 30, 2020)

shkhln said:


> I'm just surprised anyone would try whatever left of Solaris after Illumos split off...


Nostalgia? Bragging rights?


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## neel (Jun 30, 2020)

I have an ASRock motherboard in an old computer (across the country at my father's place) and the only problem is no keyboard on the FreeBSD loader prompt. This computer is BIOS-only.

The truth is different OEMs will have different implementations of their BIOS even with the same BIOS vendor (e.g. AMI, Insyde) since AMI, etc. sell a framework an PC/mobo vendor can use (not unlike what Wordpress is for websites). Heck, the same OEM can implement BIOSes slightly differently for different PCs (e.g. consumer vs commercial, Windows vs Chromebook, etc.).

I had an Asus motherboard AMI BIOS boot FreeBSD and dual-boot in UEFI and Legacy just fine but hang on OpenBSD's partitioning once installed, a HP slimline AMI BIOS refuse to dual-boot in UEFI if Windows is loaded, while an HP Spectre and Omen both with AMI BIOSes as well dual-boot FreeBSD and Windows just fine in UEFI mode, and doesn't even freeze if I use OpenBSD.

And a Dell Inspiron Insyde UEFI spit out ACPI errors every 10 seconds on FreeBSD that it had to be manually disabled.

But an area of improvement, some of HP's very recent systems, including "consumer" units aren't the buggy systems their predecessors were. My personal HP Spectre laptop and Omen desktop work fine with FreeBSD, dual-boot and such. But this was limited to what I have access to.

I'm too lazy to build a PC at this point, I'd rather hack on CURRENT (I am a src contributor but not committer) and tweak my FreeBSD/ipfw firewall, but if I had to build again I probably would take ASRock.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows or UEFI/firmware.


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## Lamia (Jun 30, 2020)

neel said:


> a HP slimline AMI BIOS refuse to dual-boot in UEFI if Windows is loaded, while an HP Spectre and Omen both with AMI BIOSes as well dual-boot FreeBSD and Windows just fine in UEFI mode, and doesn't even freeze if I use OpenBSD


These comments are confirmed. No matter how hard I tried to write grub into an HP laptop for a dual-boot when Linux was added to existing an Wins, the box kept spitting it out.


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## Jose (Jul 1, 2020)

neel said:


> The truth is different OEMs will have different implementations of their BIOS even with the same BIOS vendor (e.g. AMI, Insyde) since AMI, etc. sell a framework an PC/mobo vendor can use (not unlike what Wordpress is for websites). Heck, the same OEM can implement BIOSes slightly differently for different PCs (e.g. consumer vs commercial, Windows vs Chromebook, etc.).


Chromebooks use Coreboot, BTW.  I wish everyone did. A lot of these problems would go away.

My little anecdote for the pile: I have an Asrock motherboard that refuses to boot in BIOS mode. It fails to post if I dare to even enable the CSM (Compatibility Support Module).


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## skeletonboss12 (Jul 6, 2020)

He's not wrong. ASrock is just bad in general, it's not just FreeBSD you should avoid it on.. 

They have THE most fucky, broken firmware you could ever ask for, whether it is the EUFI or the various controllers, it is pretty messed up either way..  

Their only redeeming quality is they (used) to be good cheap boards for OCing (if you used windows)

I will not spam about it here but I have scores of old stories of asrock board weirdness that to this day just boggles my mind


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## skeletonboss12 (Jul 6, 2020)

Jose said:


> Chromebooks use Coreboot, BTW.  I wish everyone did. A lot of these problems would go away.
> 
> My little anecdote for the pile: I have an Asrock motherboard that refuses to boot in BIOS mode. It fails to post if I dare to even enable the CSM (Compatibility Support Module).



those lga 1155/1156 boards always had terrible support for that kind of stuff. Had to update the bios on my fathers' just to get it to boot disks using GPT (Winbloze 10 wouldn't have it any other way)


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