Messages in this thread | | | From | (david parsons) | Subject | Re: NetGear FA310TX/tulip.c | Date | 25 Mar 1999 10:03:08 -0800 |
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[warning: LONG]
In article <linux.kernel.Pine.LNX.3.95.990324233439.5546A-100000@catbert.desm.plconline.com>, Dave Weis <djweis@plconline.com> wrote: > >> Out of curiosity, why do you refer to the Tulip clones as >> `abominations'? I'm running a few of them in high-performance > >The spontaneous reboots and/or lack of functionality in via chipset based >machines made me call them much worse than that.
Now I'm really curious, because the machines I'm putting them are pretty close to exclusively VIA-based, and the only downtime the any of them have had (in the past 90 days, which is when I got the 8-pack and started installing the chips) have been when nfsd jammed up talking to a AIX machine and I had to reboot the file server to get socket 2049 out of CLOSE_WAIT.
We are talking about the same tulips and VIA chipsets, I hope? The Netgear cards I've got have one nearly tulip sized chip on them titled:
NETGEAR NGMC1698 9843 AN6258.1
which is described in hinv (on the server, which I'll describe exclusively, because it's been running longest and has the most to lose if the card turns out to be icky) as
eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC eth0: MII transceiver found
And the VIA chipset I've got on the motherboards (FIC PA2013) is Vendor id 1106, Device id 586, which dmesg reports as
ide: VT82C586 VXPRO+ (Apollo) on PCI bus 0 function 57 ide0: BM-DMA at 0x6400-0x6407 ide1: BM-DMA at 0x6408-0x640f hda: IBM-DTTA-351350, 8063MB w/464kB Cache, CHS=1644/255/63, DMA hdc: IBM-DTTA-351350, 8063MB w/464kB Cache, CHS=16383/16/63, DMA
Of course, I'm not running 2.2.x on this machine; I'm running a much hacked 2.0.28, with the startup logo patch, the Webshield "this is Unix, so yes it's okay to have network modules autoprobe" patch, one of the VIA chipset DMA patches, my new.new.memory patch, a patch so that the IDE driver doesn't screw up disk geometry by trying to outguess the IBM drives, and a large crop of additional and backported 2.0.3x and 2.2.x drivers (including the netgear-tweaked tulip.c)
The hardware on this machine is pretty simple: 400mb core AMD K6/333 the netgear card FIC PA-2013 mb (1mb cache) BusLogic 958, driving a Sony SDT9000 and Exabyte 8505 2 IBM 13.5gb IDE drives some throwaway Intel 740 AGP video card (the machine runs in text mode, using SVGATextMode to get a satisfying 20x9 character cell.)
And the network topology is:
[this box] ---100mb/full dup--- [netgear switch] -- firewall --- dmz |||||| |||||| Wad of Wad of NT machines, Unix talking SAMBA. machines (SGI, HP, IBM, DEC) talking nfs to this box, because /home is mounted from here. With this box providing home directories mail the public ftp site the public web site dns for the internal network
So, as you can see, I'm rather surprised to hear that this particular combination of hardware is BAD, given that it's not yet bitten me in the ass.
____ david parsons \bi/ And since Netgear is shipping Linux drivers with their \/ hardware, guess who's getting all my business for ethernet cards? It would be distressing if all this suddenly failed.
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