Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 12:42:05 -0400 From: sbabkin@dcn.att.com To: joelh@gnu.org Cc: mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: NIC drivers Message-ID: <C50B6FBA632FD111AF0F0000C0AD71EEFF8B5D@dcn71.dcn.att.com>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: Joel Ray Holveck [SMTP:joelh@gnu.org] > > >>> Last I heard, the 509 driver was buggy. (According to LINT, it > >>> still is.) When I last tried it about eight months ago, it was > >>> still buggy. Cursory tests now (I've got one in this box, on the > >>> same LAN as an NE2000) indicate that it may still be broken. > >> Yes; the driver is not spectacular, and neither is the card. > > It worked fine for me in '95-'97 in my machine at work. Yes, it > > occasionally loses packets under high load but it's still faster > > than NE2000 (although I agree that the card is somewhat > > pathological). It can easily handle FTP at full Ethernet speed > > (1.1MB/s) in an old 486. 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. There was the same problem somewhere in '96 > > when David Greenman had changed the way the watchdog routines are > > called for network drivers, but after this driver was changed > > according to the new way it worked again. > > Hmmm... What version of FreeBSD are you using? I'd like to get mine > working; you appear to know what's going on. > I was using 2.0.5 at that time (and 2.0 before 2.0.5 was released), but 3c509 driver was for some period of time ahead of FreeBSD releases, I have transplanted it from later version to support Plug-n-Play mode and some other minor changes (actually, some of the changes were going in reverse direction, transplanted into -current from my 2.0.5 development machine). They key words to fix it are "use the watchdog routine, Luke" :-) The biggest problem with this driver seems to be that nobody from the core team is actively using it so when something in the network system gets changed, this driver gets broken until someone else who is actively using it notices and fixes that. -Serge To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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