Re: Recommendations for 100Mbit Ethernet Card

Alan Donald (alan@orion.ign.com.au)
Tue, 25 Nov 1997 22:25:57 +1100 (EST)

I'm using a 3c905 card in my machine with a Linux 2.0.32 kernel, the only
(obvious) problem is when i go ping -f 127.0.0.1, i get the first 177
(everytime) packets received, but the rest it drops. I can succsessfully
flood ping another host. Amazingly it doesn't bring down an NT 4 box in a
screaming heap (until you give it 10k packets that is) :)
I get a maximum %utilization (by NT's reckoning) of about 30-35%,
althought if i push up the packet size, i can hit a peak of about 40%.
I get about 3000k/s with tcpspray.
I'd still recommend the Intel 100b PCI card, we use it at work, and seems
to perform a fair bit better than the 3com. I'm yet to try this in my
linux box, but definately looking forward to it.
Al

On Tue, 25 Nov 1997, Harald Koenig wrote:

> On Nov 24, JonesMB wrote:
>
> > did they give a reason for not using the 3c905 cards. I am using 5 of these
> > right now in 2 different machines with no problems but if it is not a good
> > idea to use these, what should I use in the next set of Linux machines that I
> > setup. One thing though, to make those 3c905 cards work, I did have to get a
> > newer 3c59x.c driver file than the one that came with the kernel source that I
> > used, (v2.0.30)
>
> there are no docs available for these new 3COM chips which resulted
> in very bad drivers for this cards (it's a surprise for me that Don Becker
> even managed to get these cards working). so _many_ people suffered
> from complete network lockups and/or very bad performace on 100MBit
> when not using busmaster dma (which fixed lockups).
>
> same happened to us when we bought 10 boomerang cards for PPro machines
> in a 100Mbit net end of last year. and I spent _much_ time to get an idea
> whats really broken and trying to hack and fix the driver and testing new drivers
> over and over again (and hacking cron jobs every minute to restart
> locked up networks) until I finally realized that there are no chip docs at all
> so there was not too much hope to get a reasonable driver in reasonable time
> and thus I gave up and replaced all cards with DEC tulip chips in May/June
> (from LANTRONIX, works great and very cheap!).
>
> now I know that the most recent 3c59x.c driver from Donald seems to be
> (somewhat?) better for boomerang (but not for vortex) but it's still
> the problem that 3COM doesn't supply docs and that a similar disaster
> might happen again for the next chip generation so I decided for myself:
> no more 3COM in the future and I told 3COM managers about this decissions
> and it's reasons...
>
>
> Harald
> --
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>