NIC driver question
Nathan Vidican
nvidican at wmptl.com
Tue Nov 21 05:22:29 PST 2006
Frank Bonnet wrote:
> Hello
>
> I will receive in few days my new mail server the machine will
> be an IBM X3650 bi xeon.
>
> I wonder what would be the "best" network interface to
> plug in (if necessary) as I don't know for now what is
> the builtin interfaces in this machine.
>
> To be clear I'm asking gurus on what is the "best FreeBSD supported"
> NIC driver to avoid eventual perfomances problems.
>
> Thanks a lot.
As for 100mbit cards:
Hands-down, Intel 'fxp'-driven cards... rock solid in terms of
performance and stability; never had a single unit go bad, used hundreds
of them, including dual and quad-port cards.
On the gigabit side:
I've had great luck with broadcom cards using the 'bge' driver, and a
few intel cards utilizing the 'em', but nothing real extensive or
saturated enough to authoratively say they work under extreme pressure
or anything. I've got a couple of dual-opteron servers here with dual
on-board broadcom gigabit cards that have ben running flawlessly for
over 2 years now, (uptime 378 days on one, the others were rebooted
several weeks ago to be relocated to a different rack). Knock-on-wood,
no panics or mysterious network outages as of yet - so I'd say they're
fairly stable - but again, never end up near saturated over here to give
you an answer on performance.
Anyhow, just my two cents - if you don't need gigabit, ya can't go wrong
with Intel 'fxp'-driven cards :)
--
Nathan Vidican
nvidican at wmptl.com
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