Re: tulip 100mps card; need advice
On Mon, 24 May 1999, Eugene Sevinian wrote:
> George, thanks for advices,
> The need for such setup was due to the estimated bandwith of overall
> network transaction of about 0.5Gps. Thus, using CISCO or any other
> non-PC based solution we need to establish high speed interface between
> this switcher and some proxy server. The idea is that attaching network
> interface directly to PC would allow us to solve this task. Is it
> sounds stupid?
Why not use gigabit ethernet? There are a few cards that are supported
under Linux. See
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/index.html#gigabit
for more details.
> > > should look for?
> > >
> > I have had good luck with the Intel Pro 10/100+ cards. The trouble with
> > going into 10MB mode might not be the network card, many hubs do not
> > auto-negotiate properly. Just force it in the driver at boot.
> Do you mean linux network driver or card's SETUP utility?
> I have noticed that hub was able to detect 100mps up to linux loading
> stage :(
I mean when the Linux driver attempts its auto-negotiation scheme. It can
easilly fail. Just set it in the boot parameters.
>
> > Get three of the quad adaptec
> > tulip cards, thats $500-$600 each and gives you 12 ethernet ports on three
>
> Are they supported in linux kernel?
Yup, quad tulip cards.
> Then we should connect this switch to the server at ~500mps. Is there any
> standard solution? May be fiber optic?
Gigabit ethernet.
Note that Linux might not be your best choice for this application. As of
2.2.9, the Linux kernel is still not fine-grained enough. There is work
underway to allow networking and disk access to scale better with
multiprocessors but curently, you are not going to get any better network
performance or disk I/O performance with multiprocessors because whoever
is writing or reading from the network has the kernel locked.
There are efforts underway right now to improve this but you are still at
the mercy of the PCI bus for moving data.
DEC Alpha chips are going to give you much better performance than Intel.
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