> Hello, I'm finally going to rebuild my bsd firewall
> and the only nic I have handy is an aopen pci
> nic that has a realtek RTL8139B chipset.
>
> So, I'm wondering what everyone's opinion of that
> chipset is. Will it perform reasonably in my firewall?
> It's pretty heavily used by about a dozen people
> with about 15 machines total.
The realtek chipset is known to be not the best chipset
out there. Have a look at the comments in FreeBSD's
if_rl.c:

/*
 * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is
 * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible
 * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master
 * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance
 * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
 *
 * For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor
 * registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned
 * on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to
 * do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely
 * case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet
 * is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only
 * four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four
 * packets queued for transmission at any one time.
 *
 * Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large
 * buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received
 * frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets
 * will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer
 * area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol
 * levels.
 *
 * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent
 * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or
 * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it.
 *
 * On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although
 * rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the
 * PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register
 * space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast
 * filter.
 *
 * The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY
 * chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where
 * the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need
 * to select which interface to use depending on the chip type.
 */

I suggest you get a 3com or intel NIC, if you have the money.
It's not like you shouldn't use it, it's just that there are better NIC's
out there :D

Regards,
Douwe