I've been trying for some time to lay hands on a 10/100 ethernet card
that I could put in production.  I have thwo cards now that "work", and one
on the way that supposedly will work *well*.

To wit:

-Report from the field on 10/100 ethernet PCI cards in a PM 7600/132
and NetBSD 1.5.1 kernel:

-the rtk driver (for a D-link DFE-530TX+ el-cheapo) works fine, sees
the 100Base T, but has poor performance, as far as I can tell.
Reportedly this is because it's a sub-marvelous chip.

-I have an Asante 09-00169-01 card (Dec 21140-AF chip).  It
works, but only partially.  It works fine in 10BaseT mode.
It does not auto-select 100Base T, nor FDX.  I can manually select
100baseTX, but it starts getting errors and whines and complains
and gets lots of errors.  The result is poor (dismal) performance.
I am using the de driver.  I could try the tlp driver, but I'm
not sure exactly how.   Is there a How-To somewhere on this?

I have an EtherPower II card coming my way in the next few days.
I'm hoping that will work well.


I may also get wild and buy a 3Com board.  They're more expensive, though.

-dgl-

(below - included for context)

>On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 11:20:48AM -0700, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>
> > Is there a discussion of this somewhere?  I might want to get a 
> > "good" 100BaseT card and how do I know which ones actually are 
> > supported with no-copy drivers?
>
>Err, not sure if there's really any good discussion of this... but I
>can list off a few:
>
>	- SMC EtherPower II (SMC 9432TX).  This is supported by
>	  the "epic" driver.  This is one of my favorite Ethernet
>	  chips, from a driver-writer's perspective.
>
>	- Sundance Tech. ST-201.  This is a pretty good chip, and
>	  is found on the D-Link DFE-550TX.
>
>	- 3Com 3c905B, 3c905C, etc.  These are pretty good, as well.
>
>Note I have listed here chips that can DMA to arbitrary buffer boundaries
>on the receive side -- many chips, for whatever braindamaged reasons, require
>a 4-byte aligned DMA buffer for receive, which means that the IP payload is
>misaligned, which means on arch's like PowerPC, you have to copy the packet
>in order to adjust alignment.
>
>-- 
>        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>