Excellent woodwork 😀

As even in the retro community not everyone is aware of the low power consumption of the K6-3+ here’s proof of it:
https://youtube.com/shorts/KlB7xc52GBY?si=1IwFRvj13-lPW6-K

And that’s without any effort to optimize power consumption. I already have a few ideas how to shave off some more watts.

Thank you for sharing your project! Have you made any progress?

I like your idea and I'm trying to put my old computer back into service following your example and other info on the forum here. I was able to upgrade the CPU to a K6-3+ which is both faster and lower power, but now I'm stuck.

Could you elaborate on the software needed or any special tricks? I've tried a couple different PCI SATA cards (including a 3124) but they don't seem to be recognized. Did you have to find drivers or load a custom BIOS maybe?

I'm still stuck trying to find software for the SAS/SATA cards. I guess the trick is to first boot on the IDE port with a boot loader that can then see the RAID card?

Most of current linux versions I've tried are too bloated to run on this hardware.

Along with the 450MHz K6-3+ CPU, I was able to upgrade the RAM to 512MB. This was very helpful with installing/running T2 linux because it has to compile a lot of stuff to add packages. I saw T2 linux was an option in one of the videos, so I've been trying to use that. I installed the "486" version but the K6-3+ is more like a "586" or "686"? There is an option for setting the CPU type specifically to K6-2 for building/installing packages, but when I do: "./t2 upgrade" it always fails at the same point with the machine rebooting after many hours of compiling. It may still be running out of RAM/swap?

Anyway, it still does not recognize any of the SATA/SAS/RAID cards I have tried. The best I can do so far is a PCI IDE card that should be a little better than the built in ports. Grub does not like this though, so I may need to install from scratch on a drive attached to that card...

I guess the original poster is long gone. Does anyone have advice?

nickles rust wrote on 2025-03-26, 18:59:

Along with the 450MHz K6-3+ CPU, I was able to upgrade the RAM to 512MB. This was very helpful with installing/running T2 linux because it has to compile a lot of stuff to add packages. I saw T2 linux was an option in one of the videos, so I've been trying to use that. I installed the "486" version but the K6-3+ is more like a "586" or "686"? There is an option for setting the CPU type specifically to K6-2 for building/installing packages, but when I do: "./t2 upgrade" it always fails at the same point with the machine rebooting after many hours of compiling. It may still be running out of RAM/swap?

Anyway, it still does not recognize any of the SATA/SAS/RAID cards I have tried. The best I can do so far is a PCI IDE card that should be a little better than the built in ports. Grub does not like this though, so I may need to install from scratch on a drive attached to that card...

I guess the original poster is long gone. Does anyone have advice?

Are you following this https://t2sde.org/documentation/buildintro.html ?
IMHO, it might make the most sense to cross-compile (optimized for your chosen target machine) and build an optimized ISO on a modern machine. Then, you could use that ISO to install it on the K6 machine. Cross compiling on a modern machine will be much faster and you are unlikely to run out of RAM.

Other than the SIL3124, what cards are you considering using ? Do they all have boot ROMs that seem to work (do you see a splash screen during boot) ?

You may need to explicitly enable support for the IDE/SATA/RAID chipsets/card(s) you intend to use while setting kernel compilation options (I have no idea what's enabled by default ).

Thanks for the reply. I've tried a few different linux versions and T2 has the most current kernel, but none seem to detect the PCI SATA/SAS cards I've tried. None have a boot message on the POST screen, or have any BIOS options. Maybe I need to get a super socket 7 board. In the video it looks like he is booting on a CF card plugged into the IDE port on the motherboard. I'm guessing this can then load the drivers for the PCI card(s). I've tried the 3114, 3124, and a couple that use the marvel chips, both RAID and plain. These used cards are pretty inexpensive at the moment, but with no luck so far I'm reluctant to keep buying random cards to see if they work. I must be missing something and I'm not an expert in linux or the finer points of server hardware.

nickles rust wrote on 2025-03-28, 17:21:

Thanks for the reply. I've tried a few different linux versions and T2 has the most current kernel, but none seem to detect the PCI SATA/SAS cards I've tried. None have a boot message on the POST screen, or have any BIOS options. Maybe I need to get a super socket 7 board. In the video it looks like he is booting on a CF card plugged into the IDE port on the motherboard. I'm guessing this can then load the drivers for the PCI card(s). I've tried the 3114, 3124, and a couple that use the marvel chips, both RAID and plain. These used cards are pretty inexpensive at the moment, but with no luck so far I'm reluctant to keep buying random cards to see if they work. I must be missing something and I'm not an expert in linux or the finer points of server hardware.

The lspci command should at least enumerate all PCI devices, even if there is no compatible kernel module (driver) available for it.

If lspci does not list a device, either the PCI bus or a subcomponent (bridge) is not getting initialized properly OR, more likely, the card is not workable due to a hardware incompatibility (PCI version, 3.3v vs 5v voltage issue).

Of course, a card might just be defective, too.

EDIT: Maybe do a quick install of Windows XP and see if any of the cards appear in device manager.

Also what motherboard brand and model are you using and do you have any known working PCI cards of any type that you could use to test that PCI slots on the motherboard are at least basically functional (card is detected in Windows or lspci under Linux) ?

Thoughts on using a PCI killer NIC?

Sphere478 wrote on 2025-04-02, 15:36:

Thoughts on using a PCI killer NIC?

Gigabit Ethernet over 33MHz PCI, if it even gets close to its max bandwidth, won't leave much for disk I/O if running over on then same bus, regardless of the NIC type.

No idea as to whether a killer NIC might help or not. I was felt like those were 99% hype anyway.

I have one, and a intel g1000? Forget the model, anyway, did some testing. And got similar results, It seems like there is potential to get more from the killer NIC though with specific tasks and settings. Other cards I tried were lower performance than these two from my recall. So these two were the best I found.

Testing done under xp or 2k if I recall. On a dual pentium 233

Thru put seemed to be mainly a processor limitation not a bus limitation

Sphere478 wrote on 2025-04-03, 01:25:

I have one, and a intel g1000? Forget the model, anyway, did some testing. And got similar results, It seems like there is potential to get more from the killer NIC though with specific tasks and settings. Other cards I tried were lower performance than these two from my recall. So these two were the best I found.

Testing done under xp or 2k if I recall. On a dual pentium 233

Thru put seemed to be mainly a processor limitation not a bus limitation

The killer card just hijacks the stuff going to the windows network stack and sends it through its own thing. Works great for actual CPU offloading, sure, but it's still a very messy solution, and if you have a program that talks to the stack directly, it will fail to connect and lock up. Not to say they're overly useless, but the chance of incompatibility is so high that I recommend against their use for windows fodder and instead recommend they go straight on the 4-letter auction site for an Amiga user to buy for their PCI endowed machine as a CPU accelerator card instead, which makes much better use of the hardware on the card for a different purpose.

If memory serves they're also a pain to set up usage in Linux as well, given they run Linux onboard already, and honestly the suffering is so great I once again recommend doing the aforementioned or just keeping it on a shelf as a conversation piece.

I can recall using a Pro/1000 card of some description in a PCI slot on a Socket 7 board many years ago under 2000 and getting respectable speeds for the hardware inside it. I think I had a K6-2/500afx loaded into that thing overclocked to 550, but it was also a very late baby AT ss7 board. The big thing to watch out for is shared IRQs above everything else. Unless the board has the necessary support for over 15 IRQs and proper bus mastering on that end, you will have a bad time no matter if the hardware is a Pentium MMX or a Pentium III, or some athlon job. Combo cards will use more than one IRQ, and unless steps are taken to minimize conflicts, they can either work just fine or do rather screwy things.

I have an OptiPlex GX400 early socket 423 P4 box and while it has IOAPIC support and all that fun stuff necessary for upper IRQs, it only assigns certain devices up there and doesn't push anything from the PCI slots into that range by default and manually putting them on the steering IRQ for all that ends up for naught as windows XP actively swaps it all back. I had to draw up a diagram for myself to remember which slots share stuff with onboard devices and other slots just to get around incompatibilities with hardware or drivers not playing nice. Some cards and their drivers are coded and designed with certain hardware assumptions in mind either as a lazy hack or PCI spec misunderstanding which can cause some pretty wacky results...