In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chen Zhao writes:
>What is the next most (unofficially of course :) recommended NIC
>in terms of driver stability, card reliability and performance,
>and driver efficiency (low overhead, etc.), ignoring for the moment
>actual NIC price, and just judging from a technical perspective?
For that matter, is the fxp still the most-recommended driver on Alpha?
I was playing with ethernet cards on a NetBSD/Alpha system, and under NetBSD,
on an Alpha, a 3Com Etherlink XL ran rings around an Intel card... But on
i386, I get at least as good performance from the Intel cards. Skimming
the driver, I got the impression there were some alignment issues that
might be cheaper to solve on i386 than Alpha.
>Would the xl be next on the list, or would it be one of the previously
>mentioned D-Link/Netgear cards for which documentation is freely
>available? I've always thought that the latter brands were lower
>performance cards...
The tulip cards can be quirky, if nothing else. I used to like the VIA Rhine
cards, because they were cheap, and I had no problems with them... until
suddenly they started crashing at 100Mbps. I don't know why; I ran some of
them under very heavy loads at 100Mbps. I can't tell whether it was new
cards or a driver change.
Jason Thorpe did a radically reworked Tulip driver for NetBSD that seems
to handle the majority of the cheapo 21140-series clones quite nicely.
-s
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