[vortex] Dual port 3c920

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Paul English wrote:

> I have a Beowulf cluster with Tyan S2462 motherboards, each with dual 
> 3c920 onboard. I am currently using only one of them on each system, and I 
> would like to improve the interconnect speed of the system overall as it 
> is a bottleneck.

I assume you mean bonding. This will increase bandwidth, but latency will 
remain the same.

> I've heard (off-list) that on this motherboard it is essentially a dual 
> port single nic, instead of literally two nics, so for some reason running 
> non-IP protocols (like MPI, etc) would not work. Is that correct?

No. They should appear as 2 NICs (like eth0 and eth1).

> Even if that were the case, might I still be able to put in a second
> switch and use one NIC in each system and a dedicated subnet to at least
> remove the NFS traffic from the rest of the traffic?

Surely.

> Also has anyone had any luck getting the mvia driver working for this 
> board ?

For some time I tried to track down development in the low-latency-on-FE 
department (basically M-VIA and GAMMA), but time constraints forced me to 
stop. I think that I was able to compile the 3c59x driver from some 
earlier version of  M-VIA, around 1.0 with the actual kernel at that time.

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De