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it may be obvious by now that i like to make a habit of warning others what hardware does or doesn't support gnu/linux from my own experiences, but this time i have something a little different - a warning that via chipsets do indeed work, but only if you have the time and patience to mess about with them. as such i'll simply warn not to buy motherboards that make use of them, but please don't worry too much if you already have such a board.
for those wondering, via make a number of chipsets, and in this case i'm refering to there ide and sound (ac97) controllers. you can check what via chipsets (if any) you have on your board using the lspci command.
anyway, as mentioned in another thread somewhere, i'm currently in the process of moving my server over to gentoo 2006.0 from a now ancient fedore core 3. today i got kde up and running for the first time, and to my surprise found a VERY sluggish system all of a sudden, and an arts error i havn't seen in years - "/dev/dsp - device not found". ignoring the error for now, i first checked hdparm and sure enough dma was disabled - odd given i explicitly enabled it during install and previous tests had shown it to be on. whats more, running
br /]su
<root password>
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda
resulted in a permissions denied error, very odd!
next step, i did what any self respecting sys admin would do - asked google for help  . turns out near all slack and gentoo users with via chipsets are having similar problems (and i expect users of any distribution that doesn't tend to use mainstream kernels would have such problems too). near all results mentioned workaround hacks in older 2.4 kernels for via chipsets, so naturally i started recompiling my own 2.6 series kernel to see what options i have.
from memory (this was a good 20 minutes ago now, lol. i can't be expected to remember everything!) i came accross 2 settings in the kernel (2.6.16 for the record) tree for the support of via chipsets:
br /]Device Drivers
ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support
Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy supprt
PCI IDE chipset support
VIA82CXXX chipset support
Sound
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
PCI Devices
VIA 82C686A/B, 8233/8235 AC97 Controller
(note i have a feeling i found a 3rd too, but looking at the tree now i can't seem to spot it so what the hell, lets just say there's 2  ).
with the above settings enabled and the kernel recompiled (and copied accross to /boot, obviously). a reboot into the new kernel appears to have fixed the permissions error meaning i could then enabled dma, and i also no longer recieve that arts error (unfortunately i have no speakers on that system at present, so can't say whether or not sounds actually working - i just assume it is).
so effectively yes, via chipsets work in a gnu/linux environment on todays kernels, but unfortunately i still have a pretty sluggish system in comparison to how fc3 used to run, and i know for fact gentoo can do a lot better! admittedly i've yet to install the nvidia drivers so there's a fair amount of resource hogging that should disappear when the graphics card is fully functional, but i don't expect miracles and given its taken this much messing about to get the chipsets working to any reasonable degree, i'd HIGHLY advise choosing a motherboard with (for example) an nvidia chipset rather than via.
just a warning anyway.
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Laptop: 2GHz Acer Aspire 9301AWSMi, 1GB DDR2, 17" TFT, 256MB GeForce Go 6100
Sold Development System: 2GHz AMD Opteron 246, Socket 940 Asus K8N-DL
Server System: 1.2GHz AMD Athlon, Socket 462 Apollo KT133 VT82C686
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