Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 16:39:17 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <danial_thom@yahoo.com>, "Heinrich Rebehn" <rebehn@ant.uni-bremen.de>, <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card? Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNIEBGFEAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20060603232548.86465.qmail@web33308.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Danial Thom [mailto:danial_thom@yahoo.com] >Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 4:26 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt; Heinrich Rebehn; questions@freebsd.org >Subject: RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card? > > >I think its often difficult to distinguish >between what is crappy, because good code can >make bad hardware look good and vice versa. All >ethernet controllers were designed by idiots. > >My first success story (now I don't want to let >on to who I really am so I'll be vague), was an >ISA card by a major vendor that locked up >regularly, and it had a hideous reputation as >being a bad card. It was the only card of its >kind, and I needed it badly. They gave me >schematics and said that they had tried and tried >but couldn't find anything wrong with the card. >They had contracted out to some brainfarm to >write a driver, and the thing was this beautiful >self-contained scheduler (this is like MSDOS 3 >mind you) with documented source, the whole deal. >Well I tore it apart, simplified the code, got >rid of all the soft interrupt passes and cleaned >up all the memory management code. Now the card >worked like a charm, didn't lock up, ran better >than their spec and Mega-Billon$- company >couldn't believe that some 23yo kid wrote a >driver that a company they paid 100K to couldn't >get to work. > Musta been one of those Intel SatisFAXion cards. ;-) >My point is that until someone writes a really >good driver you never know if hardware is any >good or not. Now some hardware is hopeless. I'm >not sure that the broadcom controllers are that >hopeless. But since the intel cards work well and >are cheap, who's going to spend the time to pour >over the broadcom driver and make it better? >There's a ton of I/Os in there that can be >streamlined. But who's gonna do it? Its sure not >worth my time. > Precisely!!
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