Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 06:24:18 -0300 From: Craig Metz <cmetz@inner.net> To: Andre Albsmeier <andre.albsmeier@mchp.siemens.de> Cc: freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Looking for a 2 channel Fast Ethernet NIC Message-ID: <199807131024.GAA24219@itd.nrl.navy.mil> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 12 Jul 1998 18:37:27 %2B0200." <199807121637.SAA08386@internal>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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. 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. 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. 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. -Craig To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199807131024.GAA24219>