Network Card

[Barney Cordoba]

--- On Thu, 4/23/09, Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au> wrote:

> From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au>
> Subject: Re: Network Card
> To: "Barney Cordoba" <barney_cordoba at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "ovi freebsd" <lists at freebsdonline.com>, freebsd-net at freebsd.org
> Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009, 2:28 AM
> On 2009-Apr-21 14:02:38 -0700, Barney Cordoba
> <barney_cordoba at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >On all of the MBs that I have, the slot NIC appears
> before the onboard
> >ports in the pciconf -l listing. Its certainly not for
> sure.
> 
> As a datapoint to add to the uncertainty, the SunFire V440
> has 4
> motherboard NICs - two come before the PCI slots and two
> after (so
> adding a PCI-based Cassini nic moves ce2 from the MB to the
> plugin).
> 
> Even slot numbering on larger boxes (with multiple physical
> PCI buses)
> can be non (or counter) intuitive.
> 
> Also note that FreeBSD has also changed its PCI probe order
> at least
> once in the past (effectively re-numbering devices).
> 
> -- 
> Peter Jeremy

4 port NICs generally have a bridge chip on it, so they always tend
to muck things up. 

If the nics are PCI-X, you can probably add some trace to the em driver
to see what the bus speed is. Onboard NICs are usually 33mhz or 66Mhz
(I've never seen on onboard that runs 133Mhz)..however if the add-on card
 is 33mhz or PCI-E than you won't know. But if the em NIC is running at
 133 than its almost definitely  (hows that for certainty?) a plug in 
card.

Who would buy a realtek plug in card anyway?

Barney