What Gigabit Ethernet card to buy?

[Hilko Bengen <bengen@hilluzination.de>]

Hi,

I am currently in the process of choosing hardware for Debian
GNU/Linux based router systems and am looking for Gigabit Ethernet
interface cards (and appropriate mainboards).

I have the following requirements (in that order):

1. Good driver support in 2.4 kernels (it'd be ok if the kernel had to
   be patched, I'm familiar with that...)
2. Adapter should put as little load on CPU as possible.
3. Decent throughput with both large and small packets.

I have only found one paper[1] by Paul Gray that compares Gigabit
Ethernet hardware. However, the tests seem to focus on server
applications.

The numbers from the paper suggest to me that the SysKonnect cards
would be a good choice, Intel based adapters, on the other hand, seem
to be quite popular and meanwhile there are quite a few boards with
(at least) one Intel Gigabit Ethernet chip onboard.

Do you have any recommendations?

-Hilko

[1] http://www.cs.uni.edu/~gray/gig-over-copper/