From owner-freebsd-hardware  Wed Sep 13 23:37:28 2000
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	id 1814937B423; Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:37:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: fxp driver, which DUAL port cards exist and are supported ?
In-Reply-To: <0006800030802192000002L022*@MHS> from "andreas.klemm.ak@bayer-ag.de" at "Sep 12, 2000 08:10:26 am"
To: andreas.klemm.ak@bayer-ag.de
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:37:26 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
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From: wpaul@FreeBSD.ORG (Bill Paul)
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> Hi !
> 
> Is there a 2-Port 10/100 Bit network card available, which is supported
> by our fxp driver in -stable and -current.
> 
> Would every dual (or more generally spoken "multiport network") card with the
> chipsets, that our fxp driver supports, be supported, or do have dual port card
> a logic, which might not be supported by the fxp driver ?
> 
> Whats the product name for a dual port card which is known to work
> and what approx price compared to the 1-port card ?
> I assume these cards might be a little more costy...

Intel makes a dual port 82558-based NIC which works with the fxp driver.
I don't know the exact model number offhand. Each port is treated as a
seperate interface, i.e. port 1 becomes fxp0 and port 2 becomes fxp1.
The guts of a PCI ethernet adapter is basically a single controller
chip; multiport cards have two such controller chips connected to a
PCI-PCI bridge. So as far as the host is concerned, you have two
independent NICs that just happen to be sharing a single board. As far
as I know, all of the multiport cards are designed this way.

The cheapest multiport card I know of is the D-Link DFE-570TX, which
is a quad port card with Intel/DEC 21143 chips. ZNYX also makes dual
and quad port cards with the 21143, however they are likely to be more
expensive. Both the D-Link and ZNYX cards should work with the dc(4)
driver.

The Adaptec DuraLAN mutliport cards (dual and quad port) are also
supported using the sf(4) (Starfire) driver, however these are fairly
expensive: a quad port card will run about $500US.

There also exists a dual port Compaq Netelligent card based on
the Texas Instruments ThunderLAN chipset, which is supported by the
tl(4) driver, however you're only going to find these on the second-hand
market or auction sites as they're no longer in production. I mention
it just in case you happen to run across one; if you find one cheap,
it's worth getting.

The best bargain is the D-Link DFE-570TX. It's very cheap and offers
decent reliability and performance.

-Bill


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