Herb Peyerl wrote:
> Just thought I'd mention that when the driver was written, the preallocation
> code is what boosted performance from 400kB/sec to line-speed on the fastest
> machine available at the time, a 486-DX2/66.  Obviously, this was in the days
> of only PIO based 3c5x9's.

It's possible the poolifying of mbufs did make the performance difference
smaller. It would be interesting to try it again on those machines.
 
> I also played with this at the time and found it made no discernable
> difference on any of the machines I tested it with. Again, the fastest
> thing available at the time was a 486/66.

Yeah, the fact it haven't helped a bit annoyed me; I hoped  the
change might help make the card actually usable on my machine. The
driver doesn't detect any RX packet overruns with the RX Early
code, but the speed on my 386DX still sucks :( It's a bit irritating
that, according to
	http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/misc/mca_lanperform/

the card performs quite well under Linux on 386SX-20.

Jaromir
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~dolecek/
NetBSD - just plain best OS! -=*=- Got spare MCA cards or docs? Hand me them!