*BSD News Article 89920


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Which 100Mbs ethernet card
Date: 22 Feb 1997 22:52:45 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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jca@bighorn.accessnv.com (J.C. Archambeau) wrote:

> But does the EISA EtherPower 100 use the same driver as the PCI card?
> The nice thing I have discovered about the 3C59x cards is that the EISA
> and PCI cards use the same driver.

But the 3C59x cards are architecturally crappy.  I doubt the 3C9xx
ones are much better, despite of all marketing hype.  3Com went the
route to continously reduce the available buffer size.  I've heard
that they're shipping cards with as few as 8 KB FIFO, so that you are
forced to use 6 KB Rx FIFO, and 2 KB Tx FIFO.  This means that a
back-to-back stream of an 8 KB NFS block won't fit right into the
FIFO, and requires CPU interaction shortly after the first packet came
in.  Nothing i would recommend to the people, even though FreeBSD's
driver has been improved recently.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)