Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 14:20:51 -0800 (PST) From: Michael Kiernan <mkiernan@lucasdigital.com> To: black@bleep.ishiboo.com Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Virtual Interface Architecture Message-ID: <199803302220.OAA16951@moana.kerner.com> References:
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>> word is that gigabit ethernet frames grow to 9300 bytes soon. Of course > >they already have, actually. gigabit ethernet borrows a lot from fibre >channel it seems, which i think can only improve ethernet. I believe it borrows the encoding scheme as well as some of the physical layer for the SX and CX standards. >if you are thinking about gigabit ethernet, here is my experience: > >alteon NICs are bad, foundry networks and extreme networks switches are very >good. i have yet to test any bay networks gigabit ethernet stuff but i was >unimpressed by their accelar product at 100Mb. cisco, of course, isn't even >in the race yet. I don't have any direct experience with the Alteon NICs, but I do know one site that is happily using them on their Sparc fileservers. What I've heard from some of the developers is that the gig-e NICs in general, not just the Alteon cards, place a large demand on the CPU, preventing throughput from reaching what you can get today with, for example, a PCI HiPPI NIC. They're working on optimizing the drivers and pushing more functionality onto the hardware. If you've got a multi-processor system with spare cycles, as do the fileservers I mentioned above, it should work okay. In regards to switches, which Accelar box in particular are you referring to, and what problems did you find with it? If you are referring to the Accelar 100 (I think it was originally called something like SwitchNode), which only did 10/100 Mbps, it was not designed by the same company that built the current Accelar product line (Rapid City). The current Accelar products (1100, 1150, 1200, and 1250) are a different ball of wax all together. I've tested both the Foundry and the Bay Networks equipment and found both to perform well. The main difference at the time we were looking into this was the form factor. All the Foundry gear had a small pizza box form factor, while the Accelar product line was limited to the 1200, a modular chassis- based unit. Since then Foundry has come out with their own chassis-based product, and Bay Networks has announceed the 1100 series. In regards to Extreme, although their box appeared promising when we talked to them, they ran into some problems with (of all things) their 100baseTX ports and were unable to provide us with any hardware to test. Mike -- Michael Kiernan, Systems R&D, ILM mkiernan@kerner.com +415-721-3284 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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