>-----Original Message----- >From: Danial Thom [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 4:26 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt; Heinrich Rebehn; [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card? > > >I think its often difficult to distinguish >between what is crappy, because good code can >make bad hardware look good and vice versa. All >ethernet controllers were designed by idiots. > >My first success story (now I don't want to let >on to who I really am so I'll be vague), was an >ISA card by a major vendor that locked up >regularly, and it had a hideous reputation as >being a bad card. It was the only card of its >kind, and I needed it badly. They gave me >schematics and said that they had tried and tried >but couldn't find anything wrong with the card. >They had contracted out to some brainfarm to >write a driver, and the thing was this beautiful >self-contained scheduler (this is like MSDOS 3 >mind you) with documented source, the whole deal. >Well I tore it apart, simplified the code, got >rid of all the soft interrupt passes and cleaned >up all the memory management code. Now the card >worked like a charm, didn't lock up, ran better >than their spec and Mega-Billon$- company >couldn't believe that some 23yo kid wrote a >driver that a company they paid 100K to couldn't >get to work. >
Musta been one of those Intel SatisFAXion cards. ;-) >My point is that until someone writes a really >good driver you never know if hardware is any >good or not. Now some hardware is hopeless. I'm >not sure that the broadcom controllers are that >hopeless. But since the intel cards work well and >are cheap, who's going to spend the time to pour >over the broadcom driver and make it better? >There's a ton of I/Os in there that can be >streamlined. But who's gonna do it? Its sure not >worth my time. > Precisely!! _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"