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Date:      Thu, 1 Jun 2006 08:44:36 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Danial Thom <danial_thom@yahoo.com>
To:        Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card?
Message-ID:  <20060601154436.65932.qmail@web33311.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
In-Reply-To: <447F069C.4000002@mac.com>

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--- Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> wrote:

> Danial Thom wrote:
> [ ... ]
> >> I'm tempted to set a Followup-to: header to
> >> -chat or maybe /dev/null...
> > 
> > What exactly is wrong with all of you people
> anyway?
> 
> Why do people ask rhetorical questions?  We're
> not you, evidently.
> 
> Invert the question, and I get an answer that
> makes sense.
> Invert the answer?  You don't understand the
> point, perhaps?
> 
> Very well, let me put it another way: if your
> opinions about what's wrong 
> differ from most other people, you might do
> better to rely on a discussion 
> involving facts rather than opinions.  I
> mention this because some people 
> regard their own opinions so highly that they
> don't seem to be aware that 
> other approaches exist and might even prove
> effective.
> 
> > Clearly there are drivers that are well
> > supported and drivers that aren't. There are
> > people out there trying to run their
> businesses
> > and you seem to want to pretend that
> everything
> > is just peachy and that everything can be
> tweaked
> > and tuned a bit to be usable.
> 
> I don't know about either the OP or your
> situation(s), but I'm generally of 
> the opinion that FreeBSD works just fine, most
> of the time, on most hardware, 
> without any specific tweaking or tuning to be
> entirely usable.
> 
> That's true of some other platforms, such as
> Apple hardware and MacOS X, or 
> even Sun/SPARC boxes, as well.  YMMV.
> 
> If you have specific problems or a
> FreeBSD-driver to Windows-driver 
> performance comparison, providing #'s and
> enough details to reproduce would be 
> helpful.  Writing random flames about specific
> people is not helpful.
> 
> [ ...EOT, at least for me... ]
> 
> -- 
> -Chuck
> 
thanks for clarifying that you're more of a clown
than an engineer, chuck. I'm sure that info will
come in handy for others when you state your
opinions.

Here's the deal. When passing a controlled stream
of packets (say 10Kpps) through a 5704 controller
on the tyan MB, the cpu load is twice what it is
when passing the exact same load through an intel
card in a pci-x slot. Maybe the intel card is
superior, maybe the driver is superior, but the
bottom line is that the broadcom sucks in
comparision. I don't care if the card works well
in windows or something else; its not practical
to re-write the driver, and the intel cards are
cheap, so why give a rat's butt why the results
are what they are; I just use something else.

Perhaps you take exception to my comment about
the author of the driver, but the fact is that
the guy wrote 50 drivers from a template, he
doesn't support them, he didn't optimize them for
performance, nor did he thoroughly test most of
them (since most have stupid little quirks, which
is what happens when  you write a driver from a
template). That spells trouble to me. The intel
drivers are supported on an ongoing basis and
they were written specifically for the
controller, so they ought to work better, even if
the hardware is identical performance-wise.

Its not a "flame" to say that something works
better than something else. If you think that all
hardware and all drivers just either work or
don't, then you're not only not an engineer, but
a total fool.  Its sharing my experience. If you
care not to listen, fine, but you're making more
noise calling me names for reiterating my
experience, and at least I'm conveying
information that might be useful, unlike
yourself. You obviously have nothing to
contribute, so I don't see why you feel the need
to pipe in with an uneducated opinion. 



DT

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