On 25.11.01, 14:31:24, Michael Kukat wrote:
> Hi !
> 
> On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, Todd Gruhns Acct wrote:
> > About a year ago, I recall a Tony Hernandez asking about an ethernet
> > card with the RTL 8139 chipset. He had good things to say about it.
> > I found a RealTech (sp?) 8139 -- is it safe to assume this is the
> > same chipset? Which driver do I use with such a card?
> 
> The 8139 is very fast in Linux and Windoze, but beware of the driver in *BSD,
> about 30% of code is just a story against the very bad implementation of the
> chip, and the rest of the driver never worked very stable. This was the state
> in NetBSD 1.4.2 and FreeBSD 4.0 (same driver source). On Alpha systems, it
> runs fine, but as you start using NFS a bit more, the machine just crashes.
> Same in i386 architecture. I kicked away my 8139 cards and got a bunch of
> the - very bad in performance and link negotiation - 3com 59x or so cards.
> 
> Maybe the driver is better today, but i will not purchase a Realtek 8139 again.

The Deutsche Telekom sells Realtek 8139 based cards for use with their
ADSL kit, and I have found this to work very reliably in my
DSL-Router. It was very flaky in an old Cyrix 486, but that was
probably due to a bad PCI implementation.

I use an older 3com 905 for DSL (PPPoE using rp-pppoe) and the RTL
8193 for (100MBit) LAN. Even building kernels and packages over NFS
(rtk on client side, de (de0: SMC 9332DST 21140 [10-100Mb/s] pass 1.2)
on server) has never caused trouble.

So I'd say that, yes, the driver is better now :)

> 
> Ah yes, the driver module is named rtk, as commented in the config file.
> 
> ...Michael
> 
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-- 
Bernd Sieker

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