>Oh dear!  I just bought some 3Com 3C905's assuming that NetBSD/i386 would have
>support for them, but I just took a look at the INSTALL text, and these cards
>aren't listed under the network adapter sections.
>
>Are these cards close enough to the 3C595s that they will work under the ep
>driver, or have I made a horrible mistake?

Yes. 3Com deliberately engineered the Boomerang (90x) chip to give
hardware compatibility with the 3c59x series.  You won't get the
improved, usable DMA capabilities of the 3c905 hardware (the 3c59x has
single-packet half-duplex DMA that's essentially useless), as the
driver only uses lowest-common-denominator of all etherlink3 cards
(i.e., programmed/IO to move packets to or from the onboard FIFO with
minimal use of `parallel tasking').

However, the card and driver works just fine.  The 10/100 hardware
does N-way autodetect so media selection with 3c905 will not be a
problem.  The 900x UTP/10baseT cards are also reported to work, but I
don't have one myself. work. I _beleive_ ifmedia works properly on
these cards -- it does on the 3c590 -- but if there are any problems
you can always change the default.

The only cards that aren't supported are the PCMCIA 10/100 (3c975?)
and the 3c515 (ISA 10/100).


>And if all is lost, what is recommended as the most smoking 100BaseT ethernet
>adapter out there that will work with NetBSD? 

The interfaces based on the latest-generation DC21143 are supposed to
be pretty hot. They fix the 32-bit-DMA alignment peformance bug, , but
I don't know if NetBSD has a driver that takes advantage of it.
Ask Matt Thomas.