Tom Pinckney: gigabit ethernet

[Frans Kaashoek]

fyi

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Date:    Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:13:03 -0500
From:    Tom Pinckney <pinckney at exoinc.com>
To:      kaashoek at lcs.mit.edu
Subject: gigabit ethernet

Hey,

So PCI sucks. We got 6 fast ethernet cards working in our Dell box and
it looks like the bus tops out at 370mbits/s. The main reason for this
seems to be our cards are doing very small transfers at a time. The
good news is xok seems to deliver all the available PCI bandwidth up
to cheetah since it tops at out at the same point.

We're interested in seeing if next generation cards like gigabit
ethernet cards have similar DMA deficiencies. If you can supply the
cards we'd be glad to port an open source driver (the packet engines
yellow fin gigabit has a simple freebsd driver already) for the public
exopc distribution. Probably take < 1 week for us to do it.

Anyway, if this would be useful to your router work, it would be useful 
to us too.

Tom

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