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Date:      09 Jul 1998 16:56:07 +0200
From:      smoergrd@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com (Dag-Erling Coidan Smørgrav)
To:        sbabkin@dcn.att.com
Cc:        mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: NIC drivers
Message-ID:  <rx44swrysxk.fsf@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com>
In-Reply-To: sbabkin@dcn.att.com's message of Thu, 9 Jul 1998 10:47:40 -0400
References:  <C50B6FBA632FD111AF0F0000C0AD71EEFF8B5B@dcn71.dcn.att.com>

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sbabkin@dcn.att.com writes:
> > sbabkin@dcn.att.com writes:
> > > Although I don't know about the current state of the driver. There
> > > was a period (early '95) when packet loss led to the hang of the
> > > card and that's the reason why it was marked as "buggy" in LINT at
> > > that time. This was fixed but this comment just was not cleaned up.
> > Believe me, it still sucks. Search the archives (both the mailing list
> > archives and the PR database) for "no buffer space", and/or "ep0".
> > Basically, the driver is fine for telnet and mail, but wedges under
> > sustained load. I can get it to hang without ever going above 20 kBps
> Do you have heavy disk load ? This card has small buffer size

No. I experience these problems mostly while playing MP3 audio files
which reside on an NFS file system. It is invariably the server that
gets wedged. The disk load is practically identical to the network
load in that case (~130 kbps)

> so it's sensitive to interrupt delays. Another problem is that in
> case of buffer overflow it has to be reset. But when the watchdog
> routine discovers this, it restores just fine and the problem 
> generally occurs not that often. Of course, if it was

Nope. Once it's wedged it stays wedged until I do ifconfig ep0 up.

> not broken again (I've fixed it twice but I don't have these cards
> any more so I have no interest in doing that once more :-).

> > (160 kbps). Gimme an Intel EtherExpress.
> Sure, _now_, when you can get 100Mbps EtherExpress for
> the same money, nobody would buy 3c509. But a few years ago
  --------------
Half the money, if the reports I've heard of EtherExpress cards
retailing at $50 are reliable.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - smoergrd@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com

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