GA621 NIC

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Andrew Shewmaker` wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jan 2003 12:48:54 -0600
> "Henderson, TL Todd" <Todd_Henderson at isl-3com.com> wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone have any experience with the Netgear GA621 fiber NIC and RedHat
> > 8.0?
> > 
> > They ship drivers for RH 7.1, should the these drivers be close enough to
> > compile and work under 8.0?
> I believe I have used the kernel's ns83820 driver, rather than the drivers 
> that shipped with that card.

Until recently the ns83820.c driver had significant performance
"issues".  My ns820.c driver was about 2.5X faster.  This has led to an
undeserved bad reputation for the NatSemi gigabit chip.

(The 83820 does have higher overhead, especially on non-x86 systems,
because it cannot byte-align the received packets.  But that's exactly
the same limitation as the highly regarded Tulip chip.)

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993