Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:22:15 -0500 From: Nathan Vidican <nvidican@wmptl.com> To: Frank Bonnet <f.bonnet@esiee.fr> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NIC driver question Message-ID: <4562FD87.1080105@wmptl.com> In-Reply-To: <4562CF3D.1070203@esiee.fr> References: <4562CF3D.1070203@esiee.fr>
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Frank Bonnet wrote: > Hello > > I will receive in few days my new mail server the machine will > be an IBM X3650 bi xeon. > > I wonder what would be the "best" network interface to > plug in (if necessary) as I don't know for now what is > the builtin interfaces in this machine. > > To be clear I'm asking gurus on what is the "best FreeBSD supported" > NIC driver to avoid eventual perfomances problems. > > Thanks a lot. As for 100mbit cards: Hands-down, Intel 'fxp'-driven cards... rock solid in terms of performance and stability; never had a single unit go bad, used hundreds of them, including dual and quad-port cards. On the gigabit side: I've had great luck with broadcom cards using the 'bge' driver, and a few intel cards utilizing the 'em', but nothing real extensive or saturated enough to authoratively say they work under extreme pressure or anything. I've got a couple of dual-opteron servers here with dual on-board broadcom gigabit cards that have ben running flawlessly for over 2 years now, (uptime 378 days on one, the others were rebooted several weeks ago to be relocated to a different rack). Knock-on-wood, no panics or mysterious network outages as of yet - so I'd say they're fairly stable - but again, never end up near saturated over here to give you an answer on performance. Anyhow, just my two cents - if you don't need gigabit, ya can't go wrong with Intel 'fxp'-driven cards :) -- Nathan Vidican nvidican@wmptl.com
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