From owner-freebsd-hardware Thu Aug 26 11:57:45 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from panzer.kdm.org (panzer.kdm.org [216.160.178.169]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5CB2015427 for ; Thu, 26 Aug 1999 11:57:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ken@panzer.kdm.org) Received: (from ken@localhost) by panzer.kdm.org (8.9.3/8.9.1) id MAA84266; Thu, 26 Aug 1999 12:57:16 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from ken) Message-Id: <199908261857.MAA84266@panzer.kdm.org> Subject: Re: what's the best working gigabit ether card... In-Reply-To: <199908261718.NAA05996@whizzo.transsys.com> from "Louis A. Mamakos" at "Aug 26, 1999 01:18:56 pm" To: louie@TransSys.COM (Louis A. Mamakos) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 12:57:16 -0600 (MDT) Cc: mjacob@feral.com, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG From: "Kenneth D. Merry" X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Louis A. Mamakos wrote... > > > > Another thing to keep in mind, if you're going to be connecting more than > > two machines, is that the Alteon switches are the only ones that I've seen > > that currently claim to do jumbo frames. They cost a bundle, but they're > > more or less the only game in town. My guess is that will change > > eventually. > > Packet Engines is also doing jumbo sized Gigabit ethernet in their > switches. This was something that was a requirement at work (UUNET) > since the backbone already carries 4470 bytes frames, and we didn't > want to have to fragment going over gigabit ethernet plumbing. That's very good to know, thanks. I wonder why they don't mention it on their web page? Another odd thing is that they claim there is a 3rd party FreeBSD driver for their Gigabit ethernet PCI card, although I don't know of one. (There's certainly not one in the tree.) > You might also check around for an Internet Draft recently published > on how to encapsulate jumbo-sized frames. This can be problematic > for some protocols that use SNAP encapsulation since the ethernet > type field is used as a length; this normally isn't a problem since > the lengths were smaller then the range of ethernet types assigned. With > jumbo frames, this is no longer true. > > In our case, this came up in the context of encapsulating CLNS frames > on the wire. This is used commonly on ISP backbones that run Integrated > IS-IS routing protocol as their IGP. Hmm, thanks for the info. Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@kdm.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message