FreeBSD/i386 runs on a wide variety of "IBM PC compatible"
   machines. Due to the wide range of hardware available for this
   architecture, it is impossible to exhaustively list all
   combinations of equipment supported by FreeBSD. Nevertheless, some
   general guidelines are presented here.

   Almost all i386(TM)-compatible processors with a floating point
   unit are supported. All Intel processors beginning with the 80486
   are supported, including the 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium
   II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, and variants thereof, such as the Xeon
   and Celeron(R) processors. All i386-compatible AMD processors are
   also supported, including the Am486(R), Am5x86(R), K5, AMD-K6(R)
   (and variants), AMD Athlon (including Athlon-MP, Athlon-XP,
   Athlon-4, and Athlon Thunderbird), and AMD Duron(TM) processors.
   The AMD Elan SC520 embedded processor is supported. The Transmeta
   Crusoe is recognized and supported, as are i386-compatible
   processors from Cyrix and NexGen.

   There is a wide variety of motherboards available for this
   architecture. Motherboards using the ISA, VLB, EISA, AGP, and PCI
   expansion busses are well-supported. There is some limited support
   for the MCA ("MicroChannel") expansion bus used in the IBM PS/2
   line of PCs.

   Symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems are generally supported by
   FreeBSD, although in some cases, BIOS or motherboard bugs may
   generate some problems. Perusal of the archives of the FreeBSD
   symmetric multiprocessing mailing list may yield some clues.

   FreeBSD will take advantage of HyperThreading (HTT) support on
   Intel CPUs that support this feature. A kernel with the
   options SMP feature enabled will automatically detect the
   additional logical processors. The default FreeBSD scheduler
   treats the logical processors the same as additional physical
   processors; in other words, no attempt is made to optimize
   scheduling decisions given the shared resources between logical
   processors within the same CPU. Because this naive scheduling can
   result in suboptimal performance, under certain circumstances it
   may be useful to disable the logical processors with the the
   machdep.hlt_logical_cpus sysctl variable. It is also possible to
   halt any CPU in the idle loop with the machdep.hlt_cpus sysctl
   variable. The smp(4) manual page has more details.

   FreeBSD will take advantage of Physical Address Extensions (PAE)
   support on CPUs that support this feature. A kernel with the PAE
   feature enabled will detect memory above 4 gigabytes and allow it
   to be used by the system. This feature places constraints on the
   device drivers and other features of FreeBSD which may be used;
   consult the pae(4) manpage for more details.

   FreeBSD will generally run on i386-based laptops, albeit with
   varying levels of support for certain hardware features such as
   sound, graphics, power management, and PCCARD expansion slots.
   These features tend to vary in idiosyncratic ways between
   machines, and frequently require special-case support in FreeBSD
   to work around hardware bugs or other oddities. When in doubt, a
   search of the archives of the FreeBSD laptop computer mailing list
   may be useful.

   Most modern laptops (as well as many desktops) use the Advanced
   Configuration and Power Management (ACPI) standard. FreeBSD
   supports ACPI via the ACPI Component Architecture reference
   implementation from Intel, as described in the acpi(4) manual
   page. The use of ACPI causes instabilities on some machines and it
   may be necessary to disable the ACPI driver, which is normally
   loaded via a kernel module. This may be accomplished by adding the
   following line to /boot/device.hints:

hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

   Users debugging ACPI-related problems may find it useful to
   disable portions of the ACPI functionality. The acpi(4) manual
   page has more information on how to do this via loader tunables.

   ACPI depends on a Differentiated System Descriptor Table (DSDT)
   provided by each machine's BIOS. Some machines have bad or
   incomplete DSDTs, which prevents ACPI from functioning correctly.
   Replacement DSDTs for some machines can be found at the DSDT
   section of the ACPI4Linux project Web site. FreeBSD can use these
   DSDTs to override the DSDT provided by the BIOS; see the acpi(4)
   manual page for more information.

FreeBSD 7.2 releases i386 ISO-IMAGES 7.2-BETA1-i386-bootonly.iso

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