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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!torn!uunet.ca!uunet.ca!fw.novatel.ca!sidney.novatel.ca!hpeyerl From: hpeyerl@sidney.novatel.ca (Herb Peyerl) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: Does FreeBSD support two NICs? (3c509) Date: 3 Aug 1994 17:23:29 GMT Organization: NovAtel Communications Ltd. Lines: 52 Message-ID: <31ojqh$1q9@fw.novatel.ca> References: <harpCtL4BJ.1FL@netcom.com> <5379@bigfoot.first.gmd.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: sidney.novatel.ca X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL1] Andreas Schulz (ats@first.gmd.de) wrote: : I hope you won't gate much traffic with it. The problem with the : 3com 3C509 cards is, that their FIFO is too small. They only have : a 4Kb send and receive FIFO to store packets. The send side is no : problem, but on the receive side you are getting the problem to : get the bytes fast enough out of the card to the main memory or : to disk(especially the last is the problem). If you are using this : card under NFS with normal sizes, you are getting from every good : workstation 8Kb blasted in from the Network without "gaps". But the : card can only hold the first 4Kb and the rest get lost and need to : be retransmitted and this slows down very much the whole thing. : You can get through that card 400-500Kb send and receive with : a 486, but only if you receiving a file to /dev/null. If you : try to store it to disk you are landing at transfer rates for : receiving wth 30-40Kb. I don't believe you. At least not in the case of NetBSD. If this is the case for FreeBSD, you can hardly blame it on the hardware. Example: bobbitt is an HP9000s735 the node in question is a 486-66 with 2 3c509's in it: ep0 at isa0 port 0x350-0x35f irq 7: aui/bnc/utp address 00:60:8c:f1:6a:e2 ep1 at isa0 port 0x300-0x30f irq 10: aui/bnc/utp address 00:60:8c:f1:6a:ec Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on bobbitt.corp:/disc2 1386694 1200618 47406 96% /mnt # uname -msr NetBSD 0.9C i386 # pwd /mnt # ls -al deleteme -rw------- 1 65534 65534 3955571 Jul 11 11:16 deleteme # time dd if=deleteme of=/tmp/blah 7725+1 records in 7725+1 records out 3955571 bytes transferred in 6 secs (659261 bytes/sec) 0.2u 4.3s 0:06.63 68.9% 0+0k 1+971io 0pf+0w bobbitt is one bridge away from the NetBSD machine and it's a fairly busy ethernet (hence the low transfer rate. Normally when the network is quiet; at night; I experience NFS transfer rates closer to 1000KB/sec). Also; the if_ep under NetBSD supports multiple cards quite well as is shown in the above excerpt from my dmesg. It also works with the EISA cards but my EISA card is in a friends machine. -- hpeyerl@novatel.ca | NovAtel Commnications Ltd. hpeyerl@fsa.ca | <nothing I say matters anyway> "A sucking chest wound is nature's way of telling you to slow down."