Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 10:37:07 -0700 (PDT) From: lamaster@george.arc.nasa.gov To: wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Which PCI Ethernet card is best for FreeBSD-current? Message-ID: <199710021737.KAA07677@george.arc.nasa.gov>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
|> Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: |> |> <<On Thu, 2 Oct 1997 08:38:08 +0400 (MSD), =?KOI8-R?B?4c7E0sXKIP7F0s7P1w==?= <ache@nagual.pp.ru> said: |> |> > Could someone share his experience with me and tell about 2-3 best models? |> > Stability is more essential than performance for me. |> |> Intel EE Pro/100B, without question. Second choice, DEC DE500 and |> some clones. Never buy anything from 3Com. In retrospect it was probably a bad choice, but, so far, my 3Com 3C595 has worked OK, including for multicast, although network performance is not really an observable on that system. It was fairly expensive, although it was the cheapest PCI card I could get at the time. A couple of weeks later, the cheap DEC tulip cards came out... Also, although I have heard complaints about certain chip revision levels, my DEC Tulip-based card has also worked just fine, including under a heavy load and with numerous multicast sessions going: de0: <Digital 21140A Fast Ethernet> rev 0x20 int a irq 12 on pci0.10.0 de0: SMC 9332BDT 21140A [10-100Mb/s] pass 2.0 de0: address 00:00:c0:e7:69:ef Can anyone describe exactly which revs of the Tulip chipset are likely to cause problems? As I said, mine has worked fine. These Tulip-based cards can be had very inexpensively now, and, I would recommend them. I know that the memory alignment rules are pessimal, but, at least at 10 Mbits/sec, it doesn't seem to matter much. I guess at 100 Mbits/sec, it would be serious performance hit. -Hugh LaMaster
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199710021737.KAA07677>