[149] in resnet
Re: Ethernet cards
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Jan 25 06:14:03 1994
To: djib@MIT.EDU
Cc: resnet@MIT.EDU, linux-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 25 Jan 94 02:21:24 -0500.
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 94 06:13:14 EST
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
I believe 3com's number is 1-800-NET-3COM.
I bought a 3c509, and it seems to perform very well. I have had an
IRQ conflict with one kernel (the default Slackware kernel) between
the network card and my SCSI drive, but changing a similar kernel (the
one on the Slackware uniboot disk) solved that problem.
The AT1700 driver still seems to be quite buggy.
/afs/sipb/project/linux/kernel/at1700.c seems to recognize the MCC
cards, but also fails randomly. A new version of the driver doesn't
recognize the MCC cards.
The AT1700 uses programmed I/O transfer, which according to the
Ethernet HOWTO is not very speedy. The 3c509 uses shared memory,
which does consume CPU time (so does programmed I/O) but is faster.
The Ethernet HOWTO is in /afs/sipb/project/linux/howto as
Linux_Ethernet_HOWTO. It is mildly out of date with respect to the
kernel, but not severely so.
I hope this information helps.
--GBH
