Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (5130 mails)

[Hans du Plooy <hansdp-lists@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 09:07 +0200, Juergen Mell wrote:
> I am looking for a GBit network adapter which is well-supported under SUSE 
> 10.0 for our (small) server.
Intel server cards would be my first choice.  The other I have
experience with (doesn't blow my hair back but I can't complain about
them either) are the Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5701 cards.  Be advised that
both are PCI-x cards, and neither of them perform that much better than
a decent 100mbit card if you put it in an ordinary PCI slot.  The
broadcom cards also come in a 3com branded card.

> We will have 3 of these adapters in the server, 
> so the CPU load generated by the driver should not be too high.
That's what the above mentioned cards are for.  That's also why they
cost six times as much as other gigabit cards.

> Intel 
> adapaters seem to have some serious problems (sometimes locking the whole 
> system for several milliseconds, so three of them are simply out of 
> discussion)
I wasn't a ware of this.  I have several machines with Intel gigabit
cards in.  One of them is a file server for a large engineering firm -
it has four Intel gigabit cards on, and the type of usage is such that
both the 5x 15000rpm scsi raid-5 set is running at full speed most of
the time.  If there is any delay from the network cards, it's not enough
for any one to notice.

Hans