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Date: Fri, 1 Sep 1995 17:29:56 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199509010729.RAA32626@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: davidg@Root.COM, pst@shockwave.com
Subject: Re: novell ne2000 cards with FreeBSD...opinions?
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

>Yeah, I just looked at the driver and saw the programmed IO cruft in there
>to deal with the novell cards.  Bummer.  Someone mentioned that some of the
>cards really do have shared memory and can run just like the SMC and 3COM.
>Do you know anything about this?

Shared memory on my NE2000/WD8013EBT card is 50% faster, but that isn't
saying much.  The driver spends half its time bcopying to the shared
memory instead of more that half its time doing explicit i/o instructions.
The speeds are something like:

	i/o instructions:	2MB/sec
	bcopy:			3MB/sec
	IDE disk controllers:	3.3MB/sec	PIO mode 0 (or 1?) spec
	8MHz ISA bus max:	4MB/sec

Bruce