Hi Karel, I am well aware of the fact that neither of the relevant drivers (i.e. yge, yukonx, myk) currently supports the Marvell 8059 as I have explicitly pointed it out in the first sentence of this thread, as well as in the previous thread I have been referring to. I personally tried them all out, so I can confirm this.
Anyways, thanks for adding the references. Concerning my old friend Google, please rest assured that we have an intense, profound and mutually enriching relationship going on for many years already and absolutely no intentions to change that ;) But all jokes aside, in my previous post describing the AFAIK quite common frustration stemming from the overall difficulty of access to up-to-date and accurate OpenSolaris hardware compatibility and driver quality information, I was certainly not specifically referring to the Marvell 8059. I absolutely do not consider the lacking driver support of this specific network chip to be a major issue especially for server and desktop users. Using a high quality dual port add-on card is certainly preferable over cheap motherboard integrated network chips anyway, if only for reasons of link aggregation, redundancy and improved latencies. On the other hand if you try to consult my "old friend" on e.g.: Opensolaris and "Phenom II X6 1090T", "AMD 890FX" or "SB850", you might easily find, that apart from various references to the thread I have started on these forums there is absolutely no other confirmation of the compatibility of this major and important CPU and chipset. As a OpenSolaris user I can well live with the fact that not every piece of cheap harware junk will work with this operating system. What is on the other hand for many potential users hard to swallow, is the difficulty of determining what hardware will actually work well on OpenSolaris or even work at all. Not everyone is e.g. willing to buy a specific CPU and motherboard only to try out whether it will work at all just because a similiar, but not identical, chipset was reported to work, neither will everyone be interested in acquiring and testing several network adapters only for finding out which of them will work well, which will occasionally hang and which features are unsupported and therefore irrelevant for making a choice. I think it is furthermmore quite obvious that not every OpenSolaris user wants to choose between giving up ECC memory, investing into multiple Opteron CPUs and a some quite expensive server board, buying some old hardware or risking incompatibility and driver issues with current boards due to lacking information. Despite Intels popularity, AMD still provides unbeatable overall value and the most affordable 6-cores and is a certainly great fit for OpenSolaris. I think the vision of the HCL was to be easily able to access information about compatibility at least with common hardware. The currently newest entry seems to be from 27-05-2010 though and e.g. the detailed report I have submitted for the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula motherboard over a month ago is still not available, making me come to the conclusion that the service must have been terminated together with Oracles abortion of OpenSolaris! Thus the important question is not whether the aforementioned dual port Intel network adapters are better than the low cost Marvell chip, thats IMHO quite obvious. Neither the question which one of them is better according to spec with full featured drivers from Intel for som other operating system. The questions are: Which of them will work better on OpenSolaris with available drivers? Which one would you recommend? Which features are missing driver support? Does one of them burden the CPU more? Which provides better latencies? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
