Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 18:05:25 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: ROBERTC@PII.COM (Robert Clark) Cc: freebsd-questions@freefall.freebsd.org, clark@opengovt.open.org Subject: Re: What network cards work well? Message-ID: <199604250835.SAA24453@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <317E74AE@smtp> from "Robert Clark" at Apr 24, 96 11:36:00 am
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Robert Clark stands accused of saying: > > Questions: > > ISA NICS: > Is the Intel EtherExpress NIC and or driver intrinsicly > braindamaged? What ISA bus NIC(s) has/have the most fully > featured driver support under FreeBSD 2.0.5 and 2.1? ie:Bpf Dunno, and the 'ed' driver is probably the best - an SMC 8013 or later clone. > Will changing from ISA to PCI based NICS lessen overhead, or > speed response time, on a P5 based system? Depends on how hard the machine is working. The 'ed' driver can consume most of your ISA bus bandwidth if you push the data hard enough. > PCI NICS: > What PCI bus NIC(s) has/have the most fully feature driver support > under FreeBSD 2.1? Probably the DEC-based cards. > If I run a DEC based Fast Ethernet card, will it run well in a standard > 10Mb network? Do the DEC based cards suffer when compared to a standard > 10Mb card? No. The DEC chipset is pretty good/ > Are 'lance' based PCI NICs supported under FreeBSD 2.1? They're known to work, but the driver isn't PCI-aware and can be troublesome to configure. I don't believe there's an active supporter for these cards at this point in time. > PCI SCSI CONTROLLERS > I've heard the NCR based PCI SCSI controllers touted as being values. > Are there any performance related functions missing from the NCR based > cards, or are the non NCR based boards just over priced? They use PCI bandwidth to run their microcode; this is not normally a problem unless your system is _really_ strapped for PCI bandwidth. They don't handle large numbers of simultaneous targets as well as the Adaptec cards, but they'll keep a couple of fast SCSI disks quite happily busy. > I attribute the timeouts to the fact that the P5-90 can drive the ix0: > faster than the card can go. I would like to run a PCI card in this > machine, but don't want to buy one until I've heard good things from people > who've used them. I have a 'lance' chipset PCI card available, but it isn't > (doesn't seem to be) supported in 2.0.5. Give it a go - plonk it in and see what address the PCI code says it's been mapped at, and then configure the 'lnc' driver to that address. You may/will have to play with IRQ and DMA settings, and I have no idea what will happen WRT the 24-bit DMA address limitations that the older Lance cards have. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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