Good FreeBSD Supported Gigabit Ethernet Card?

[Andrey Slusar]

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:17:47 -0400, Steve Bertrand wrote:

> > I'm looking to eventually upgrade my home network to all gigabit so I'm
> > going to start by purchasing a few NICs for some old servers I just
> > received. I know there are quite a few supported by FreeBSD6 which I
> > found ( http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-i386.html#ETHERNET
> > ) but I'm wondering if there is any real benefit in buying a $40 or $50
> > NIC like the Netgear GA311 or just get a $20 NIC like the D-Link
> > DFE-530TX+. The use will probably be a firewall, proxy, file server, and
> > DVR.
> > <http://www.EagleBit.com/Netgear_GA311_Gigabit_PCI_Card_p/eb-400-00357.htm>

> I have a few Netgear GA311's in production, and although I haven't done
> any benchmarking, I know that they work rock solid operating atop the re
> driver in my backup infrastructure:

> backup# uname -a
> FreeBSD backup 6.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p2 #0: Mon Mar  5
> 16:57:55 EST 2007

> backup# ifconfig
> re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
>         options=1b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>

> .... I can't speak of D-Link however. Aside from the NIC's, I have found
> some performance issues with NetGear GigE managed switches though,
> whereas they seem to slowly loose throughput width after a few months
> without a reboot.

  In gigabit networks if_re is not very stable card - needs disabling
TXCSUM(ifconfig re0 -txcsum) - it's not great choice.