“The BP6 is the world’s first and lowest cost multi-processing
motherboard. It was generously offered to 32BitsOnline for review
directly from Taiwan, and combines all the highly desirable
features of Abit’s entire line of BX boards. It has dual S370
sockets to accept the PPGA Celeron for a low-cost multi-processing
workstation. It extends the BM6, the advanced built-in controller
for Ultra ATA 66 Eide drive access from the BE6 design, all built
on the same motherboard as the highly successful and overclockable
BX6-II with its jumper-less Soft-Menu II Bios. To top it off, it
has all its predecessor’s wide Front Side Bus (FSB) selections,
voltage manipulations, changeable AGP multiplier settings, and
hardware monitoring functions with the introduction of Wake on
PS2/Keyboard/LAN/Modem/IrDA. The only thing it does not have is the
even wider FSB selections of the BF6’s SoftMenu III, the PCI
multiplier selector, the control of the voltage to the AGP, BX
chipset and dram. Tests have shown it to be an excellent value
package for a multi-purpose personal workstation or gaming rig that
dual boots between Uniprocessor Operating Systems like Win 95/98
and Multiprocessing Operating Systems like W2K, BeOS and, of
course, our favorite penguin, Linux….”
“However, you must also have a device that has Ultra ATA 66
support, as well as an OS that is able to support this feature.
Currently, only Windows 95B(OSR2), 98, NT , 2000, and Linux can
support this. Linux and W2K require beta drivers of Ultra ATA 66 to
be installed during the installation. Currently, there is no
patch for Ultra ATA 66 for BeOS R 4.5.1. Installation during
Windows NT and 2000 will ask for pressing F6 to install an external
device driver for SCSI. At this point, I inserted the supplied disk
for NT and the W2K beta driver for 2000. Linux requires a patch to
the 2.2.10 kernel. The other option is to download Gentus Linux,
which already has built-in support for UDMA 66. The kernel will
still need to be recompiled for SMP support….”
“Linux will need the kernel to be re-compiled to
multi-processing mode. If you do not use Gentus Linux, you will
also need to patch the device driver with support for Ultra ATA 66.
Recompiling the kernel took very little time, and once setup, it
too operated with seemingly improved speed. More definitive test
results will follow in a follow-up article.”