Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 10:17:08 -0700 (PDT) From: Jim Shankland <jas@flyingfox.com> To: dg@root.com Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Which PCI Ethernet card is best for FreeBSD-current? Message-ID: <199710021717.KAA08304@biggusdiskus.flyingfox.com>
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dg writes: > the 3Com device drivers (ep/vx) in FreeBSD have had a long > tradition of having various problems. One data point as a counterindicator: I have an old 486/DX2-66 box with 4 3C509's (ep driver) in it that's been running for nearly 3 years (modulo power failures, upgrades, etc.). It's been rock solid. Two of the Ethernets get pretty heavy usage (not quite saturated, but getting close); the other 2 are pretty lightly loaded. Started with FreeBSD 2.1.5, now at 2.2.2-RELEASE. As I said, rock solid throughout. These days, I use the Intel PCI cards; $65 at the corner store, full duplex, driver very well supported under FreeBSD :-). I did recently get bitten by the "scrambled preamble" problem, which locks up (at least) rev 1 cards in (at least) 10 Mb mode when the wrong kind of noise is on the line. The DEC chip cards are second choice. The various vendors' cards are not all interchangeable: the de driver is full of code to try to figure out which of dozens of kinds of cards it is dealing with. Worse, the vendors change their cards from time to time, so the new card you just bought suddenly doesn't work until the driver catches up :-(. On the other hand, the only quad cards I know of are based on the DEC chip; I'll be trying out the Znyx quad card (I think) soon. Jim Shankland Flying Fox Computer Systems, Inc.
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