[nycbug-talk] Looking for a good NIC

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "bm" == Brian McGonigle <brian.mcgonigle at gmail.com> writes:

    bm> We've just started seeing the connectivity drop on 5 new
    bm> DL360G5's (bce driver) we installed 2 weeks ago.

these bge stories remind me of the tulip (tlp/dc) disaster after Intel
bought the core from Digital and then started pimping it like a cheap
crack whore to all those chip-of-the-month-club companies.  The
original Digital parts were the best 100Mbit/s cores of the time and I
think appeared secretly inside a lot of Cisco stuff.  but then the
crappy cards flooded the market, the drivers bulged with workarounds,
and the knockoff companies started coming and going so fast that, even
if you found a decent knockoff, you couldn't get the same one six
months later.  thus the Tulip reputation became meaningless, or worse.

What about the Realtek 8169S gigabit chip that de Raadt likes so much?

Even if it were not quite as performant as em/wm or bge, something
that could avoid all this chip-stepping garbage would be worth it.
Maybe if you get a decent chip that _starts_ its life made by a cheap
knockoff company, it won't decay into crappyness as it matures.  We
may as well embrace the inevitable future of hardware, especially if
we're already using PeeCee crap anyway.

Does anyone have some horror stories about re(4)?  or know where to
get quad-8169S cards?  I think it is not PCIe, which may kill it for
many people already.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=re&apropos=0&sektion=4&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

     o   Buffalo LGY-PCI-GT (8169S)
     o   Corega CG-LAPCIGT (8169S)
     o   D-Link DGE-528T (8169S)
     o   Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 Integrated Gigabit Ethernet (8110S)
     o   LevelOne GNC-0105T (8169S)
     o   Linksys EG1032v3 (8169S)
     o   Netgear GA311 (8169S)
     o   Netgear GA511 PC Card (8169)
     o   PLANEX COMMUNICATIONS Inc. GN-1200TC (8169S)
     o   Surecom EP-320G-TX1 (8169S)
     o   US Robotics USR997902 (8169S)

...of course in the real future we will all use
HyperTransport-to-InfiniPath bridges as NICs, and debate the merits of
various TCP-to-SCTP Translating Load Balancers. For future reference,
this is pronounced TiSCToLB. :)  

but in the mean time, yeah, what cheap chip works?
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