> From: Daniel Brown <crp02@holyrood.ed.ac.uk>
> Date: Sat, 23 Nov 1996 18:58:10 +0000 (GMT)
> 
>> Would you lot recomend for use with RISC-BSD?
> 
> Were it not for it's strange bouts of silence, I'd recommend the Atomwide
> Ether3 10Base2/T podule whole-heartedly.
> 
> Under RiscOS, it works life a dream - transfer rates well over 200k/s on
> an Academic LAN. StrongARM compatible too, given the rom upgrade...

Only 200 KB/s?

I set up my ARM2 A310 and my Risc PC 600 on a LAN of it's own and used
Access+ combined with a speed application (from Lingenuity).

The Risc PC was fitted with an Acorn Access+ (I-Cubed Etherlan 600,
EtherH) network slot card, and the A310 was fitted with an Ether3
card from Acorn (actually this was made by Atomwide).

The speed application writes 10 512 KB block, and then reads them
back. When transferring from the RAM drive on the A310 I was able
to get 342 KB/s. I believe that the limiting factor was the ARM2
on the A310.

The Access+ protocol lies on top of the internet protocol suite.


Using the ANT Internet suite on my Risc PC connected to a Sun
SPARCstation 670 using a dedicated NFS server I get around 220
KB/s when transferring the 1.2-release sets over ftp.
This is on a network with almost no load.

Using NFS directly to the dedicated NFS server I get around
500 KB/s on read and write with a block size of 512 and 256 KB.
It is less when the block size decreases, but the write speed
seems to be better than the read speed all over the line, so
I guess this means our NFS server is optimized for write operations.

Only when the block size drops below 4KB, is the card slowing down
to less than 200 KB/s.

I am using Acorn's TCP/IP protocol suite NFS client on top of
the ANT Internet Suite stack.
I also used Alsystems speed application during these tests.


But, this indicates that at least the EtherH card is quite capable
when it comes to speed.

Unfortunately I cannot test the other two cards I have as I haven't
managed to connect them to our TP network yet. One is the Ether3
mentioned above, and the other is and Ether1.


The current RiscBSD driver for the EtherH card is not good enough,
but it works, and as Jasper said, the latest kernels probably has
his patch installed.

A new driver has been written, but has not yet been delivered.


I am not sure which card I would buy for RiscBSD, as there seem
to be much problems with the ones we have drivers for, and a lot
of cards without drivers.

I would appreciate it if someone in the kernel team would list
the current status of all Ethernet drivers and come up with
a recommendation.



Kjetil B.