Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 11:43:54 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: julian@whistle.com (Julian Elischer) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Suggested ehternet chips/cards? Message-ID: <199702010113.LAA11999@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <32F26FB5.167EB0E7@whistle.com> from Julian Elischer at "Jan 31, 97 02:18:29 pm"
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Julian Elischer stands accused of saying: > We are looking at making or OEMing a dual ethernet card for some > applications. This should be an ISA card for now.. > is there a dual enet ISA card that people have had good experience with. I've actually never met a dual-ethernet ISA card. 'm presuming that space is the primary reason behind your wanting a dual-ISA card. Have you looked at using a couple of PC-104 ehthernets on a PC-104 piggyback board? (I realise that this may be prohibitively expensive). > for this reason I'm especially interested in a card/chipset that > would support DMA (even cheasy PC DMA), or at LEAST use a shared > memeory pool (ISA memory ops are faster than PIO). If you're going to DIY, I would recommend using one of the 8390 derivatives; these support lots of shared memory (up to 64K, although the 'ed' driver only currently supports 16K), and as anyone who has beaten on the 'ed' driver knows, they work rather well. NatSemi have a whole family of these parts; at least some of them have integrated line drivers as well (8390x family). Winbond (89C90x) and UMC also do similar parts. Terry might be able to find out whoever did the Artisoft AE-2 cards; they're a fairly legendary piece of hardware based on the 83902. Neither the SMC nor the similar Crystal parts have impressed me at all; they all have really small (~2K) buffers, possibly because they try to put the buffer RAM on-chip. > julian -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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