NetBSD network speed under VMware ESXi

["Joel Carnat" <joel%carnat.net@localhost>]

Hello,

I've just tested running NetBSD and OpenBSD as a VMware ESXi Virtual
Machines.
I expected to see differences between NetBSD and OpenBSD because I read
OpenBSD had vic(4), and understood this was an optimized driver for
VMware.
I previously ran NetBSD on ESX and got poor network rate transfer (10Mb/s).

My actual configuration is somehow weird and probably far from inefficient
(ESXi boots from USB on a laptop and VM disks are accessed from NFS ran by
a Kurobox...) but I still got better transfer rate than I expected.

The NetBSD's network card goes:
pcn0 at pci0 dev 17 function 0: AMD PCnet-PCI Ethernet
pcn0: Am79c970A PCnet-PCI II rev 0, Ethernet address 00:0c:29:0a:24:b3
pcn0: VMware Tx segment count bug detected
pcn0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 18
pcn0: 10base5, 10base5-FDX, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, auto, auto-FDX

And ifconfig says:
pcn0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        address: 00:0c:29:0a:24:b3
        media: Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)
        supported Ethernet media:
                media 10base5
                media 10base5 mediaopt full-duplex
                media 10baseT
                media 10baseT mediaopt full-duplex
                media autoselect
                media autoselect mediaopt full-duplex
        inet 10.15.5.28 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.15.5.255
        inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fe0a:24b3%pcn0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1

Using FTP, the NetBSD VM was able to transfer the netbsd kernel file and
i386cd.iso at 5.39 MiB/s (according to ftp(1)). On the OpenBSD VM, using
the same transfer test, I got 4.65 MB/s.

As far as I understand those two measures, this looks like about half a
100 Mb/s LAN and about 4 times a 10Mb/s LAN. I am wrong expecting a 10
MiB/s transfer rate in a decent configuration ?

Does NetBSD support 100Mb/s as a VMware Virtual Machine ?

TIA,
   Jo