*BSD News Article 89963


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD as router
Date: 23 Feb 1997 22:10:44 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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Charles Mott <cmott@srv.net> wrote:

> I'm not sure the 386 can keep up with full ethernet bandwidth (I see 200 to
> 400 kbytes/sec throughput on my system). 

I think this depends from your ethernet card.  If you've got a
PIO-only card (NE2000, 3C590 etc.), CPU speed might be important.  For
a shared-mem or DMA card (SMC8013, DEC-based PCI, Lance), the CPU
speed is probably much less important.

Yes, i know, the 3C590 could in theory also do DMA, but even the
tech-doc from 3Com makes you cautious about not assuming that this
will overally get you better performance.  It's very hard to draw the
line for this card where DMA makes sense and where not.  I think the
days where 3Com was leading in networking hardware are over now.

-- 
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. ;-)