sufficiently-capable networking cards

[William Lovaton]

Hi there,

This is my first post to the list.  I have been using tux 2.2 with
RedHat 9 in the production web server of my company with excellent
results.

We are serving a large enterprise web application to several users (550
concurrent) all over the country (Colombia).  We are using
Apache/PHP/Oracle in combination with tux in a somewhat modest hardware:
Compaq SMP 4x PIII 550MHz, 2GB RAM. (Right now we need more CPU power)

I'm willing to make the move to Fedora Core 2 as soon as possible to get
the benefits from the new 2.6 kernel.   Looking the documentation in tux
3.2.18 it says: 

  "Given sufficiently-capable networking cards,
   it enables direct scatter-gather DMA and hardware-based TCP/IP
   checksumming from the page cache directly to the network, avoiding
   extra data copies."

Can any body post a list of "sufficiently-capable" network cards??

Currently, I'm using this one:
Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100]

I'd like to update the NICs to newer/better hardware.  What NIC model
would you suggest me??  specially one that uses a feature complete
kernel driver and it is actively maintained.

Besides this, I'd like to know what models of Gigabit Ethernet NICs are
well supported in the kernel.  We are planning to enhance the network
connection between the web server and the database server.


BTW, What are the major new features and improvements in tux 3.2 over
2.2??  Besides the 64-bit kernel and a 32-bit userland support mentioned
in the NEWS file, I suspect there are more good surprises in there.

Thanx in advance,


-William