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Date:      Mon, 3 May 1999 10:36:35 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        hart@at.dotat.com (Leigh Hart)
Cc:        shocking@prth.pgs.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Decent network cards for 100Mbit?
Message-ID:  <199905030836.KAA21954@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <199905030910.SAA17770@at.dotat.com> from "Leigh Hart" at May 3, 99 06:39:47 pm

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> Stephen Hocking-Senior <shocking@prth.pgs.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Having discovered that the Realtek chipset is a
> > flatulent sack of pus,
> 
> Um, what gives you that idea?  I've used literally dozens of
> them throughout my network on both router based bsd boxen as
> well as busy servers (the 10Mb variety).

i think he refers to the 8139 (100Mbit version) which has some
performance limitations according to the driver, and essentially
forces you to do a memory copy.

This said, you get what you pay for!
While the board might have its problems and bugs (e.g. i get
occasional timeouts and watchdog interventions with the 8139 on a
10Mbit bus), several other cards are not exempt from bugs, and they
only work well because various software workarounds.

Here we have a variety of 2114x (i think over 100 in various labs,
1996 to 1999 vintages[buy date]) and i have experienced quite a
few problems in multicast usage (and fixed some of them; but there
are still systematic problems with the 21143...), plus the cards
tend to fall asleep and you need to manually restart it every now
and then.

The Intel "fxp" is advertised by these lists as a very good one, but it
costs twice the Tulip and 3-4 times as much as the 8139

	cheers
	luigi


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