SMC's own driver

[Juergen Quade FB03]

> Hi there!
> 
> ...
> 
> To get a rough overview of the transfer rates that could be achieved
> with this setup I performed some FTP transfers. To my surprise the rates
> have been below the ones I achieved with a simple ISA card connected to
> an equivalent 10Base2 cable using the same computer!
> 
> Here are some possible explanations to this facts:
>   - a defect card (at first I would like to exclude this)
>   - disturbances in the fiber optic part of our network (which is used
> very little at the time being)
>   - problems with SMC's driver

So I did a very rough performance test:
	The performance variies very very much, but to give you a
	number: it is about 20 and 30 kByte/sec, which is more
	than 10 times less than a normal 10Mbit Card :-(

Your card seems _not_ to be defect.

But because SMC provides the source code for the driver, it should
now be possible to find out:
	- why is Donalds driver not working with fiber PHY interface
	- why is the SMC driver slow

If I ever get some spare time ...

       Juergen.

> 
> The first two points seem to be very time consuming to check. Therefore
> I would like to ask the readers of this list who are already succesfully
> using SMC's Linux driver with a fiber optic network to perform a similar
> test and to report their results to the list! (Citation from the
> Ethernet-HOWTO concerning this FTP test: "Another common trick is to do
> a ftp> get large_file /dev/null where large_file is > 1MB and residing
> in the buffer cache on the Tx'ing machine. (Do the `get' at least twice,
> as the first time will be priming the buffer cache on the Tx'ing
> machine.) You want the file in the buffer cache because you are not
> interested in combining the file access speed from the disk into your
> measurement. Which is also why you send the incoming data to /dev/null
> instead of onto the disk.")
> 
> Thanks in advance
> Ulrich
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