Beau Kuiper wrote:
> What are peoples opinions on the realtek 8139 cards? Australia is in the
> process of being totally dumped in them. How well do they work under linux, esp
> under heavy load in terms of reliability and performance.
Overall they are much poorer a chipset that Tulip, even poor tulip
clones.
For received packets, there is a single 32K or 64K buffer for all
received packets, which is much less optimal than other cards, which use
separate packet buffers for each received packet. This slows down
processing, and also introduces "Rx FIFO overflow" which means RTL8139
needs special handling code to deal with this situation.
For transmitted packets, there are four packet buffers (much better than
a ring buffer!) used for outgoing packets. BUT... each packet must be
aligned to a 32-bit address, which is a silly requirement: Since Linux
aligns its IP header on such a boundary, the ethernet header is usually
aligned on a 16-bit boundary. This is not sufficient for RTL8139, so
the entire packet must be copied (slow!) before it can be transmitted.
In my experience owning an RTL8139 is more stable than owning a NetGear,
BUT it is an even worse chip design than the NetGear. The NetGear is at
least an attempt to copy a decent design. RTL8139 is just flat out a
poor, slow chip design.
I typically recommend 21140 or 21143-based Tulip boards as being the
most stable under Linux, as well as being affordable. You can hunt
around and find decent Tulip boards for the price of a RTL8139 or
NetGear board.
Regards,
Jeff
--
Jeff Garzik |
Building 1024 | Free beer tomorrow.
MandrakeSoft, Inc. |
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