Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 14:01:06 -0600 From: Nate Williams <nate@sri.MT.net> To: bugs@freebsd.netcom.com (Mark Hittinger) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: re: Slow 3c590's Message-ID: <199604112001.OAA04945@rocky.sri.MT.net> In-Reply-To: <199604111839.NAA03641@freebsd.netcom.com> References: <199604111839.NAA03641@freebsd.netcom.com>
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> I'm not sure this tid bit applies to the 3c590. > > The other 3c5xx cards I have played with have a firmware setting labelled > "client mode" and "server mode". > > Naturally I selected "server mode". Many FreeBSD'ers have made the same > choice for obvious reasons! > > As it turns out, the "server mode" is a way that 3com artificially throttles > the number of interrupts you can get per unit time (somehow). This is to > allow a novell style server to have some cycles for other things. > > If you set the card to "client mode" then the 3c5xx cards will process > interrupts as quickly as they can, without a firmware inhibitor. > > So boot the dos setup tool that comes with your ethernet cards and make sure > that you've selected "client mode" on all the card (assuming such a setting > exists on the 3c590). > > Your performance should go from dismal to tolerable. :-) Be careful. By setting this and a high baud rate (which performs a similar task of limiting the # of interrupts) you can cause the card to go 'too fast' for FreeBSD, causing the # of mbufs to quickly be run out. This happened on my 3C589B (PC-CARD), so I set the speed to 38400 which caused it to throttle itself because it thought the machine needed to service alot of serial interrupts. Nate
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