I just picked up a Linksys re(4) board, in preparation to converting my
house to gigabit networking.  I've noticed two problems with the board
thus far.

First -- it's much slower on transmit than receive.  It can receive at
at least 420K bps, but only transmits at 200K bps.  

Second -- it takes a *very* long time to autonegotiate with a (Netgear)
GigE switch, so much so that I had to add !sleep 15 to my ifconfig.re0
file.  I'm not sure how I'd do that for a dhclient host.

I've tested this on a fast (dual core, 2.13Ghz) machine running
4.0beta2 and a slower (1.5Ghz Athlon) one running 3.1.  Both problems
occurred in both systems, though I think the speed numbers were
(understandably) a bit better on the faster machine.  I can get a
modest performance boost by turning on checksum offloading, but the
difference between send and receive is still a factor of 2.

So -- is this a problem with the board, the chipset, or the driver?  If
this is a hardware limitation, what gigE boards should I be buying?


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb