[H-GEN] Time loss on copy

[Mike Andrew]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and ]
[ Unix-related topics.  Please observe the list's charter.          ]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Frank Brand wrote:
> 
> It might be preferrable to get a nice PCI card but on 10 Mb link there is
> little difference between PCI and ISA and, while it is possible to get  PCI
> cards second hand, new  3COM PCI cards cost as much as some people's whole
> computer setup. Good PCI cards are still not widely available in the second
> hand market. I seem to get quite acceptable performance from ISA cards but I do
> not use the NE2000 cards so I can not comment. The ISA Digital, 3Com and SMC
> cards that are fairly common around seem to be OK. I have recently been using
> some Intel Pro ISA cards and these have been good too! In my own boxes I tend
> to use DEC Tulip PCI cards as they seem to be well recognised and have
> always performed flawlessly for me. However I know a few people who have had
> trouble with them. I recently set up a Windows box for a friend and used a 3COM
> 905 TX PCI card and it just would not work at all for some reason. When I
> replaced it with a DEC Tulip it just was spot on! Network cards can be totally
> unpredictable!!

sorry Frank for quoting you in full but your comments are interesting.
Different people's perceptions. Other newsgroups I attach to scream at the
mention of Tulip. A) they are wonderful, and B) they are total pigs to set up.

Isa cards for me have been excellent to set up and very poor performers, even at
10Mb. 1.7Mb -> 2.3Mb bandwidth versus 3.4 or higher using an equivalent pci.
That's just broad base measurement. The drop in load on the cpu is much more
pronounced.

As for NE2000, this is the base base base Nic ethernet card. Ethernet in toto
was popularised by Novell, and to open the doors wide they chose the cheapest
possible implementation. An 80x9 chipset. Almost any equivalent card would
perform better than this cheapest of all possible ethernet chip designs.

Performance wasn't an issue of course. Market penetration was. The end result
is of course that the 8039.o module is used by just about every isa card out
there (underlying the ne.o module for instance). So yes, you are quite right
that the second hand market is stuffed full of these cards, they are cheap,
and, because of their common Novell heritage are easy to set up (disregarding
ISA pnp), but as performers, they are intentionally crippled and significantly
poorer in operation. While I would hapilly continue using them in desktops
around the office, i wouldn't dream of putting them in a server because of the
cpu penalty, not the bandwidth. But I suppose that's self evident anyway.

 -- 
http://linux.nf/stepbystep.htm +mirrors

--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.