NIC Drivers

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 02:30:46AM -0400, Chris Flecknell wrote:
 > Random question,
 > 
 > Is there any advantage of using an xl(3com) NIC vs. the built-in HME NIC on
 > an Ultra10?  Or vice versa..
 > 

Personally I don't see much advantage over hme(4). atm, the only
plus is in xl(4)'s checksum offload capability.(IMO) However,
hme(4) will have checksum offload capability too in near future.
In addition, due to bugs of 3Com chips in some revisions, xl(4)
now disabled TX checksum offload capability.

fxp(4) has one nice feature that mitigates interrutp load on host
cpu via loadable microcode. But I don't know that feature works
on sparc64. In hme(4) we can reduce TX interrupt load with minor
patch too. Unfortunatly, that yielded performance drops(serveral
percentage) in netperf TX test.

Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon
-- 
Pyun YongHyeon <http://www.kr.freebsd.org/~yongari>