Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 09:42:20 -0800 (PST) From: Bill Paul <wpaul> To: vince@venus.GAIANET.NET (Vincent Poy) Cc: bruce@zuhause.mn.org, mturpin@shadow.spel.com, brett@lariat.org, hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Good, cheap 100BaseT Ethernet cards? Message-ID: <199812251742.JAA21681@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812242038080.319-100000@venus.GAIANET.NET> from Vincent Poy at "Dec 24, 98 08:46:17 pm"
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> Where can I even find a 10/100Mbps NIC Card that uses the RealTek > chip? Again, they crop up in various places; it's hard to keep track. The only one I know of for sure is the SMC 1211TX. > So from what you're saying above, a AMD K6-200, 233 and Intel > Pentium 75, 90, 100, 233MMX won't be able to drive it? They should work with any CPU, and getting 10Mbps isn't a problem no matter what, but trying to get 100Mbps is going to be hard unless your CPU can do really fast buffer copies. Frankly, I was stunned that it worked as well as it did on the PII 400; so far I haven't seen anyone else try a RealTek card on a similar system and report the same results. > > Note that SMC also uses the RealTek in a board called the EZ Card 10/100 > > PCI 1211TX. The chip may have the RealTek logo covered up and they > > changed the PCI vendor and device ID in the EEPROM, but it's definately > > a RealTek. (Out of curiosity, if somebody uses these with LoseNT and > > can do some performance comparisons between the LoseNT driver and the > > FreeBSD driver, I'd be intersted in seeing the results. Granted LoseNT's > > networking is vastly different from FreeBSD's, but it would still be > > fun to compare them.) > > I always thought SMC has their own chipset besides using the > Digital DEC before. They still do: they still sell the EPIC-based Etherpower II cards. The EZ Card 10/100 PCI is supposed to be a low cost alternative. I think one of the reasons they feel they can get away with selling such a crappy card is that Micro$oft keeps increasing the 'minimum' system requirements for running Windoze. You can overcome the crappy performance of the RealTek chip by throwing more CPU power at it, but the result is that you end up paying a lot of money for a husky CPU because you thought you were getting a good deal on a $5 ethernet card. > Out of curiousity, I noticed that there is a SMSC, is > that the same thing as SMC? I'm not quite sure what happened to SMC, however SMSC (www.smsc.com) appears to be the chip-making portion of the company while SMC (www.smc.com) seems to be the retail sales and distribution arm. > > Other cut-rate boards that should work, in order of desirability: > > > > - ThunderLAN based cards (Compaq Netelligent, Olicom 2326). The > > Texas Instruments ThunderLAN is a nice chip, sadly underused. > > There aren't exactly cut-rate; pricing is often on par with the > > high-end cards (Intel, 3Com) but if you can find one cheap, grab it. > > Performance is comparable to the Intel and 3Com XL cards (uses > > the if_tl driver). > > I haven't seen any of these around anywhere. I got my Olicom 2326 card from CDW. I think they also have some of the Compaq ones. However Texas Instuments has designated the ThunderLAN as 'don't use in new designs' which means the chip is still in production but they may have plans to phase it out. I also think Compaq is now using Intel chips instead of the tlan these days. Too bad DEC sold off its networking division to Intel before Compaq gobbled them up, otherwise Compaq would have its own source of high- performance ethernet chips. > > - Boards based on the Macronix 98713A, 98715 and 98725 chips. These > > are DEC tulip clones and will work with the if_mx driver. > > Performance is pretty good. Note: the 98713 is different from the > > 98713A: the former has an MII bus for NWAY-capable PHYs while the > > latter has NWAY support built in. I have not been able to obtain > > a 98713 board for perper testing so I don't guarantee that the > > autoselection will work. However, the card should still work if you > > manually set the media with ifconfig. The 98713A, 98715 and 98725 > > cards should all autonegotiate properly. > > Never seen these either. The 98713A card I have is a SOHOware SFA100A from NDC Communications. A company called Cnet also sells some cards that use this chip. The SVEC PN102TX was also supposed to be a Macronix 98713, but when I ordered one it turned out to be a VIA Rhine II. > > - The Netgear FA310TX Rev D1 with the PNIC chip will indeed work > > with FreeBSD using the if_pn driver. Speed should be good. The > > LinkSys LNE100TX and Matrox 10/100 FastNIC will also work. > > Hmmm, which one is the PNIC chip? The one that says PNIC on it? :) > Is it the one that says DEC on > it or is it the current model with Netgear printed on the chip? DEC is DEC. The one that says Netgear on it is a PNIC (Lite-On 82c169). If you look closely it says '169B' on there somewhere; this is the only indication that it's an 82c169 Lite-On chip. It also has a Level One LXT970 PHY chip. > So the > current Linksys LNE100TX does work? Yes: the chip says LINKSYS and 82c169 on it. This is also a PNIC. The Matrox FastNIC 10/100 is the same exact card as the LinkSys LNE100TX, except the chip on that one actually says PNIC on it. The board layout and all the components are identical though. I'm not sure which one is cheaper. > Are these boards as good as the 3Com > and Intel? As good? No, I wouldn't say that. They're not bad, but the Intel and 3Com have a nicer design. > > - VIA Rhine I/Rhine II cards such as the D-Link DFE530TX. These > > are reasonably reliable but performance will suck just like the > > RealTek. Why? Because although the Rhine chip uses descriptor-based > > DMA mechanism, it expects data buffers to be longword-aligned. In > > BSD networking, you aren't always guaranteed that packet fragments > > in mbufs will start on longword boundaries, which means you have > > to do buffer copies on transmit. The RealTek 8139 suffers from the > > same flaw, and I strongly suspect that the VIA Rhine chips began > > life as RealTek products. Works with the if_vr driver. > > Hmmm, guess that one is out of the question even though I see it > all over the place. This one may actually be slightly better than the RealTek, however on my Pentium 200 test machine I can only get about 7MB/sec out of it on transmit. > > - Winbond W89C840F cards, such as the Trendware T100-PCIE. This chip > > is a half-hearted tulip clone, however it suffers from some extreme > > brain damage. I recently discovered that it generates corrupt packets > > at 10Mbps half-duplex mode in some cases and I'm still trying to > > find a way around this problem. It does appear to work okay in > > 10Mbps full-duplex and at 100Mbps modes. If somebody dumps a bunch > > of these on your desk, give them a try, but don't expect too much. > > I haven't seen much of these other than the 10BT NICs. The 10baseT versions use the W89C940F, which is an NE2000 clone. Slightly different model number, totally different chip. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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