8139too driver has problem?

[Richard Welty]

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 15:27:11 +0900 SHIBUYA Katsutoshi <shibuya at bu-denken.co.jp> wrote:
> I found a document mentioning about such problem;
> http://linux24.sourceforge.net
> Here they say "RTL 8139 cards sometimes stop responding. Both drivers 
> don't handle this quite good enough yet."
> but in the "Fixed" section...

the realtek 8139 and related chips are simply not very good ethernet
chipsets. because they're cheap, they are however depressingly
common. i tolerate them in workstation applications but quite frankly
they're bad news in servers because they fall apart under heavy
loads. the design is fundamentally flawed (Theo de Raadt wrote
an extensive and informative diatribe about how bad they are
on the openbsd misc list a month or two back, it's worth looking
up to get an insight into just how bad the design really is.)

"buy another card" isn't the most pleasant advice you can get,
but you may suffer less pain if you go that route. if you can perhaps
scrape up an old tulip based card (netgear fa310 (_not_ 311), dlink
dfx 500 (_not_ 530), smc etherpower, etc., those work well.

some 3coms (905s before the C version) and intels (later etherexpress
PROs, not the first version) are quite good. the smc etherpower II
is ok except multicast is broken. some of the other smc cards i've
used have been decent too.

hopefully some others can offer suggestions of chipsets that have
worked well for them.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
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