Just relating an experience here; I have just spent a day fault finding
a network of Via based machines intended for polygraph use. I would
strongly advise people NOT to try polygraph testing using these NICs -
they correspond to the vr driver on bsd. There are known issues with the
bsd driver for this card anyway but I would advise against its use on
ANY platform.
The reason for this is the h/ware implementation seems highly
questionable - there are bad layer 1/2 incompatibilities; the cards do
not work with some hubs and switches. Even a pair of these cards
connected with X-over cable will achieve only about 0.01Mb/s as measured
by netperf. Connecting to other vendors cards with X-over is variable
but often achieves full rates (I just measured 94.3Mb/s to a realtek
8139). Incompatibilities often seem eratic - one way testing is Ok but a
two-way test either produces very suspect results or in some cases
locked the machine up.
On the basis of this these don't seem great cards for performance
testing! A pity as the EPIA boards we have based on them are cheap as
chips and otherwise quite nice... sigh!
Anyway, this may be redundant as I know the docs advise particular NICs
but thought this might be useful info for someone on here.
Thanks too to the polygraph community for creating the package - Its
clear documentation and well written software is saving me an awful lot
of time and headaches at the minute!
Cheers
Bryn
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 06 2006 - 12:00:26 MST