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Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 23:51:31 -0800 (PST)
From: Tom <tom@sdf.com>
To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, Johan Larsson <gozer@ludd.luth.se>,
        Rob Nelson <rob@mag-net.com>, FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: 3com 3c509 card 
In-Reply-To: <199712160244.NAA00629@word.smith.net.au>
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On Tue, 16 Dec 1997, Mike Smith wrote:

> > I'd have to, too.  But in my experience, the 3c509 is a whole lot
> > faster than the NE2000 clones I've used.  Of course, nowadays with
> > fast processors, you don't see much difference, but it's a different
> > story with 486/33's
> 
> Nope.  They're both PIO cards, and the 'ed' driver spits all over the 
> 'ep' driver.  Any inversions you may have seen would have been 
> environmental relating to the different behaviour of the various chips 
> relating to bus traffic.

  In fact don't NE2000 cards have way more buffer space too?  I know all
NE2000 cards have a 16KB buffer, and I believe the 509 card is much less.

  Also, the ed driver supports shared memory cards like the SMC Ultra 16.
Fastest ISA ethernet you can get.

Tom