I've used tulip cards with good success, but not with very good
performance. So the tulip driver must have some very subtle problem that
only makes it break on some systems or with certain timings that are hard
to see normally.
That said, we switched whole-sale from tulip-based cards to Intel
EtherExpress Pro100's due to the tulips just not being consistent enough.
They sometimes got really good behaviour, but sometimes they just were
extremely slow and noisy on the cable. Whether that was a hardware problem
or simply due to the driver we couldn't tell (but both the tulip.c and the
de4x5 driver had the same behaviour - we suspect hardware).
The EEpro100 cards have been much more consistent: we got higher peak
bandwidth from the tulip cards, but average bandwidth and network
behaviour is much better with the EEpro100.
> On my System with a
> Lite On Network card (OEM) with a LC82C168 Chip
> (though driver says: Digital DS21143 Tulip at 0xb400, 00 48 54 00 97 f8, IRQ 9. )
> the tulip driver worked very well.
You could try to use the de4x5 driver too, just to see whether that maybe
works for you. I've had conflicting reports on the different drivers: on
some cards the de4x5 driver works better, on others the tulip driver seems
to work better.
I suspect it's either a hardware or software timing problem (shared by
both drivers if software), and that one or the other driver just happens
to work better entirely due to random timing issues.
Linus
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