pci network cards

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 pesch at attglobal.net wrote:

> Why isn't firewire more widely supported?

Note that Firewire is always PCI connected, so we don't preclude using
it as a regular network adapter.  It just requires the proper driver,
and perhaps a special library to use it effectively.

A major limitation of Firewire is the lack of switches.  A secondary
problem is the curious architecture of the communication, which is
oriented to repeatedly transferring a frame buffer or moving a disk
block rather than message passing.

Now that gigabit Ethernet adapters are under $100, Firewire seems to
have missed the opportunity to be a network infrastructure.

Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
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