Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 15:54:52 +0200 (CEST) From: Andre Albsmeier <andre.albsmeier@mchp.siemens.de> To: cmetz@inner.net (Craig Metz) Cc: andre.albsmeier@mchp.siemens.de, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Looking for a 2 channel Fast Ethernet NIC Message-ID: <199807131354.PAA14338@internal> In-Reply-To: <199807131024.GAA24219@itd.nrl.navy.mil> from Craig Metz at "Jul 13, 98 06:24:18 am"
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> In message <199807121637.SAA08386@internal>, you write: > >I am looking for a 2 channel Fast Ethernet NIC. I have found > >the Adaptec ANA-6922A and the SMC SMC9334BDT. > .. > >Does anyone have experience with this stuff? Or are there other > >2 channel Fast Ethernet NICs to recommend for FreeBSD? > > We use the SMC9334BDTs rather religiously. They are great boards. SMC > discontinued them in April or so and claimed that they'd be reintroducing them > on June 2 and that they'd be the same thing, just redesigned for lower cost > and to use the latest versions of the Tulip and the NS PHY chip. June 2 has > come and gone, and neither SMC's distributors nor their salescritters has any > idea what's going on. SMC's been pushing their own broken controller chip (the > EPIC) lately, so it's possible that they're just bailing out of the Tulip > market entirely. I see. So the best would be to get some these old ones. They are using the de-driver, right? Are you running -STABLE on them? > We have an ANA-6944TX (the four-port board), and it has several nontrivial > design flaws that cause us lots of grief. Three I remember off hand are that > the bridge IRQs are done wrong (all four Tulips and the bridge each ask PCI PnP > for an IRQ on the motherboard PCI bus, but the bridge's IRQ is actually used > for all four Tulips), the MII table is wrong (the values it says to send/ > expect on the MII port don't actually cause the right things to happen), and > that the NS PHY chips on the thing, even when programmed correctly, seem to > take a lot longer than they're supposed to in completing N-way negotiation. > I am not sure if the two port board has the same problems as the four port, but > it wouldn't surprise me if many of them were on that board, too. OK, so Adaptec failed for me here :-) > Another manufacturer you may want to check into is Znyx (http://www.znyx.com) > who also make 1/2/4-port Tulip boards. I have no first-hand experience with > these, but I know many people who say they work fine. Thanks for reminding me; I have forgotten the completely. > Note that, if you have an AMI BIOS, your BIOS sucks. The AMI BIOS does not > deal correctly with PnP in the presence of PCI-PCI bridges. If you're lucky, > your devices will get numbered backwards and you might waste some IRQs. If > you're not, multi-port boards just plain won't work in your system (unless > FreeBSD can be made to do PCI PnP assignments itself). People who have chatted > with AMI about this have said that AMI is completely uninterested in fixing > this. I have no machine with AMI BIOS here (only Award). Thanks for the hint anyway. Thanks for this great information. > > -Craig > -Andre To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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