[tulip] Future of tulip, good quad-cards?

[Alexander Haväng]

Hi people.

We took quite some time and wrote a very good (but function-specific) driver for the DFE-570TX card from DLink. It has four tulip chips and a PCI-bridge.. I'm sure you know the type.

DLink however has discontinued the DFE-570TX card, and instead introduced a DFE-580TX card with 4 sundance chips. Needless to say, it sucks :) Even if someone writes a perfect driver, it's still not as good as the tulip-based cards. It has no interrupt mitigation, and seems generally flaky.

Adaptec used to have quad tulip-based cards, but they have also discontinued (I think) that series and started a new range of quad cards based on their starfire chipset. The starfire chipset seems solid enough though and might be the way to go. Has anyone tried these Adaptec starfire cards with heavy traffic?

The tulip chipset is owned by intel these days.. and I think the reason that DLink and Adaptec is not selling tulip-based cards anymore is that either Intel is charging too much for the tulip cards, or that they are no longer selling the at all. Anyone know more about this?

Then there's the Sun QFE card, which I haven't tried either but supposedly it works on x86.. but it's $1500 so I really don't want to go that way :)

Any takes?

//Eel