>what is the best network card (ISA) for a PC running NetBSD??  i'm going
>to move my i386 to NetBSD soon, and i'm moving from 10Base-2 to 10Base-T
>as well.  i was looking at 3Com and SMC cards and hubs.

If you only want 10Mbit and you have a reasonably fast machine, then
either of the above will do.  If you want 100Mbit, I would recommend a
21164A-based interface, like the de500, or SMC equivalents, especially
if you can get a newer stepping that can DMA to two-byte-aligned
boundaries.  Matt Thomas' driver for tulip-based cards is very good,
which is one reason to buy DEC boards instead of SMC or Znyx.  :).


The 3Com vortex (3c59x) and Boomerang 3c905(?) cards work fine in
-current.  But 3Com is supposedly changing from the elink3 PIO
interface model to a DMA-based model, and AFAIK nobody working on
NetBSD drivers has docs for 3Com's new DMA programming model.

So in the medium term, a tulip-based card may be a safer bet.

--Jonathan