On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 11:39:22AM +0300, Laine Stump wrote:

 > I understand that Realtek chips are bad, but are they really *this bad*! 
 > What is it in ~1000 interrupts per second that can use up 65% of an Athlon 
 > XP 1800+?

The RealTek DMA is severly limited in what it can do, and so the driver
is forced to copy data from mbuf chains to other memory buffers which meet
the RealTek's constraints.

The Intel Ethernet card you went out and bought as a replacement can DMA
directly to/from the kernel's mbuf chains, which is (one reason :-) why
it performs so much better.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>