> Are you stating that the network interface on the motherboard is
> implemented in an inferior manner?  I.e. no DMA, etc.?

No - it is 'identical' to the Sbus cards except that it has certain
advantages (over the single port Sbus cards):

1) The motherboard probably has the DMA+ chip (not the DMA one) this
   means you can misalign receive buffers and still get data bursts
   on the Sbus.  (It is necessary to align the rx buffer then do a
   software copy to align' IP headers - which is on a 4n+2 boundary
   within the frame.)
   (wonder what netBSD does....)

2) Sbus slot 0 (the motherboard I/O) will (typically) have a higher
   priority than any of the other Sbus slots, the ethernet interface
   also has priority over the SCSI interface within the DMA+ silicon.
   This means that the motherboard ethernet is unlikely to suffer
   fifo underrun/overrun problems (on a single cpu system).

The Sbus priority/latency issues are even worse for any 100M (ethernet
or FDDI) cards that do not have on-board buffer storage.

    David