Intel D945GCLF2

This article is meant to provide some useful information for installing Gentoo on a great little motherboard (BOX)D945GCLF2.

Hardware overview
lspci -nn

lsusb

sensors-detect

Apparently Intel was kind enough to test Linux installation on this board and came up with the following results.

LAN Driver
The motherboard has Realtek RTL8111/8168B card which is working quite fine with inkernel r8169 module. But if you expirience weird network behavior like disconnets or slowdowns (with similar messages in dmesg "NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0 (r8169): transmit timed out") then you probably need to install the driver provided by Realtek. You can either download it from official site or find it in some overlay (in arcon at the moment).

/etc/make.conf
This board contains two regular Atom 230 CPUs, sold as Atom 330.

n.b. using the gentoo GCC 4.3.4 compiler running in a fresh 2.6.32-gentoo-r6 kernel the flags: CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=core2 -mtune=generic -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -mssse3 -mfpmath=sse" Show real promise and a nbench benchmark score almost 16% faster then the CFLAGS below or using march=native( ~ march=core2 mtune=core2) for a 32 bit CHOST. Thes Flags are copied form the Atom Z520/Z530 section of Safe CFLAGS/Intel