From owner-freebsd-hackers  Fri Sep  1 00:46:35 1995
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To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
cc: davidg@Root.COM, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: novell ne2000 cards with FreeBSD...opinions? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 01 Sep 1995 17:29:56 +1000."
             <199509010729.RAA32626@godzilla.zeta.org.au> 
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 1995 00:45:10 -0700
From: Paul Traina <pst@shockwave.com>
Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

OK, well it sounds like a 50-50 trade-off, these machines aren't going
to be doing heavy ethernet operations, so the price savings ($25/card vs
$100/card) is worth it (unless someone knows of a cheap source of WD cards
in the SF bay area).

Just out of curiosity, has anyone looked at low overhead high performance
ethernet and fast ethernet cards?  I actually care more about CPU loading
than filling up a 10mb wire... on a 100mb wire, I start to worry. :-)

Paul

  From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
  Subject: Re: novell ne2000 cards with FreeBSD...opinions?
  >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