Recommendations for NICs?

[John]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:12:29AM -0800, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Hi--
> 
> On Jan 21, 2010, at 9:27 AM, John wrote:
> > This used to be a hot topic long ago, but now seems to have become
> > rather dormant.  Does that mean that all NICs are pretty much
> > commodity with all the good features (unaligned scatter/gather,
> > etc), or does it just mean that machine performance has grown to
> > the point where we don't care anymore?  The hardware.html page
> > tells me what may owrk, but not what may work WELL.  The on-board
> > NIC uses the fxp driver.  Should I look for another card that uses
> > the same driver?
> 
> Intel (fxp, em) and Broadcom (bce, bge) make fine NICs, and the older DEC/Intel 21x4x Tulip series (dc/de) was quite good as well.  The Marvel Yukon (msk) and nVidia MCP (nfe/nve) seem to be OK (although older nVidia hardware had bugs); the Realtek (re/rl) and VIA (vr/vge) are at the bottom of the heap, especially the older pre-gigabit hardware.

Thanks!  That's perfect.  I have a chance to buy a few Intel Pro
10/100 (fxp) cards.  I guess I'll take it!

Just curious, though - you don't mention 3Com cards one way or the other,
yet there's a lot of them out there.  Any comment on those?

> Regards,
> -- 
> -Chuck
> 
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-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG