At 5:15 AM -0700 9/23/02, Daniel Eggert wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I've tried both the on-board and two PCI network adapters listed in the Install Notes for 1.6 as supported. None of them work.
>
>Can anybody tell me of a card that _does_ work?
>
>
>I'm running on a Apple Network Server 700. Here are the ones I've had no luck with:
>
>on-board                   mc(4)    chip-resets constantly
>Apple PCI Ethernet Card    tlp(4)   NetBSD hangs on executing 'ifconfig -a'
>Netgear FA-311             sip(4)   once configured, I get 'parity error' messages faster than I can count
>
>
>All help / suggestions are appreciated.
>
>Daniel


Let me provide an old data point.  This may have changed in the last few
months, and I don't have an ANS... ;->

Unfortunately, I also don't have information about the exact model numbers that
I tested any more.

My SMC board (epic driver) has been running production in my PowerCenter 132
for about a year now.  It whines in the log from time to time, but seems to
work fine.

See below,   YMMV.

-dgl-

>Delivered-To: port-macppc@netbsd.org
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>Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 10:27:53 -0500
>To: port-macppc@netbsd.org
>From: Donald Lee <donlee_ppc@icompute.com>
>Subject: Re: 10/100 card support data points
>Sender: port-macppc-owner@netbsd.org
>Precedence: list
>
>I got my SMC EtherPower II 10/100 (with WakeOnLan :-} ) and put it in my
>PM 7600. This is the same machine with the D-link (rtk) and Asante
>(was de, now tlp) cards that I've been reporting on.
>
>The epic driver recognizes the SMC card, and selects 100BaseFX right
>out of the box.  Stress testing it yields better performance than either
>the D-link or Asante cards (regardless of whether using de or tlp)
>
>Reported below is some of my impressions.  I did the performance testing
>by doing ftp transfers of real disk data, and I know that my SCSI drive
>won't put out 10 MB/s, so the performance thing is a tad bogus, but the fact
>that I get different numbers from the different cards indicates that
>there are efficiency differences of some sort.
>
>It looks to me like:
>
>	o the D-link is reliable, but slow.  I get no whines in the
>	logs, and no hiccups on data xfer, but data rates are only
>	about 1.5 MBytes/sec
>
>	o Asante is a little flaky.  It doesn't seem to matter much whether
>	I use tlp or de.  Neither one will go 100 BaseT without manual
>	intervention (ifconfig ...media...)
>	At 10BaseT, it's pretty solid, but at
>	100BaseT, it seems to "stall" frequently, causing poor
>	performance.  I also get some log messages the first time I
>	stress the card about buffer underrun - new buffer size - store
>	and forward mode.  I presume this is as it should be?
>	Resultant performance is about 1.2 to 1.5 Mb/s
>
>	o SMC Etherpower I board is found by the epic driver,
>	selects 100BaseT without prodding, and delivers a steady
>	2.2 MB/s (limit of disk speed, probably) what appears to
>	be all day long.
>
>Next step would be to get another machine with  known-to-be-good-and-fast
>100BaseT that I can use to run some *real* tests....
>
>-dgl-