While really really bored, James E. Bernard wrote:
> >I haven't done extensive testing, but I use a SMC Ultra (ISA) in my 
> >Dec P90 PCI running -current.  I have the Ultra set to "zero wait state
> >operation".  FTPs of very large files to an Alpha on another ethernet
> >go at better than 600K/sec (I get 800K/sec early in the morning when
> >no-one else is using the net).  This certainly seems fast enough for

> I also received mail from Rafal Boni (r-boni@uiuc.edu) regarding the
> 3c507, noting about 800K/sec ftp performance for that card as well
> (and providing some details about the card).

I just purchased two SMC-Elite-16C-Ultra cards and installed them on two
(admittedly slow) local machines.  This isn't a real benchmark, but it may
be useful as a data point for "real-world" usage...  On a 386-33/64k
running MS-DOG and Minuet on a crynwyr packet driver, receiving FTP data
from a 486DX/2-66/256k running NetBSD-current, I achieve a meager 160kB/s.
The machine & DOS software is probably the bottleneck, but a bit disappointing
nonetheless.

I am contemplating getting two ISA cards based on the AMD Lance instead, but
it's getting a little late to return these.

Has anyone else noticed the dearth of material on PC-clone ethernet cards?
The comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware FAQ barely touches on these interface cards.
The best FAQ I found was for Linux, and it was a bit OS-specific (and lacked
definitions of things, like what the hell predictive interrupts are in the
3c579's or whatever - sounds like marketroidspeak to me).

Also disappointing is the lack of a free NFS client for MS-DOS (my mailbox
is wide open :)).  And the clients for TCP/IP services are pretty bad,
unless you have enough hardware to run MS-Win.  For example, minuet won't
even let you select multiple files for an mget.

> BTW:  I'd still be interested to know whether there would be problems
> using an ISA bus mastering card in a >16 MB machine, if anyone can
> enlighten me.
AFAIK, and I have no contact with the core team, bounce buffers for DMA
transfers over 16MB are as-yet unimplemented.  They are probably not far
away, but this is a guess (EISA might come first :)).
-- 
VaX#n8 (vak-sa-nate) - n, CS senior++ and Unix junkie - vax@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Just the vax-man.  Read my MIPS, no new VAXes!        - PGP key on request