Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!qmw-dcs!liam From: liam@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux Subject: Re: Non-Apple Ethernet cards (Re: Apple hardware) Keywords: ethernet Message-ID: <3371@redstar.dcs.qmw.ac.uk> Date: 18 Jun 91 09:48:25 GMT References: <3105@redstar.cs.qmw.ac.uk> Sender: usenet@dcs.qmw.ac.uk Lines: 61 Nntp-Posting-Host: whitesand.dcs.qmw.ac.uk In <1991Jun14.052133.13353@panix.uucp> alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes: >A few questions about the Tri-Data (I've never seen them): >Does it have a 64KB buffer? As of A/UX 2.0.0, 16KB is "not supported" and >could conceivably cause crashes (I think William R. wrote about this). The 16K vs 64K issue is related to Apple's own cards (the old style ones). I can't recall what I said at the time, except that the 64K card made a significant difference to the NFS benchmarks I ran, but the eventual facts that emerged were: 1) Apple stopped shipping their card with 16K RAM and put 64K RAM on instead (this started at Rev L, if I remember correctly). 2) Apple didn't stop supporting the 16K cards - the same driver works for both cards since it probes the card at A/UX boot time to find out how much memory is available The new style cards could well be different: they certainly have a processor on the card for A/ROSE purposes, but I don't know if they are otherwise register compatible with the old ones. I don't think that the A/UX 2.0.1 drivers make use of the processor. >Is it register-compatible with the Apple board? That's one reason I've >stuck with the Asante boards- they can run with Apple's drivers, so I don't >have to worry about the kind of thing that has happened to owners of the >older Kinetics/Excellan/Novell/Dayna EtherPort cards (i.e., no support = >no drivers = can't use it under A/UX 2.0) Once again - all drivers which worked under 1.1 still work under 2.0 and 2.0.1. The difference between a "new for 2.0" driver and an older 1.1 driver is that the old drivers don't support EtherTalk Phase 2: they still work fine for NFS, IP and so on. My site still has about 50 old-style EtherPort II cards and is happily running A/UX 2.0 on them using the 1.1 drivers: we don't much care about EtherTalk in our environment so this doesn't cause us problems. >If the Tri-Data board compares well with the Asante on these three points >then it's a good card. I won't swear to it but I think I found that FTP >between a Mac IIfx and a Sun IPC ran at about 110KB/sec with the Asante. >Assuming that the IPC is as fast as the Sun 3, the Tri-Data may have an >edge over the Asante. (Then again, that may be a very poor assumption.) This is a very dubious comparison: a SPARCstation IPC is supposed to be at least 3 times as fast as a Sun 3, something like 12-16 MIPS. My NFS benchmarking work included a test of pure CPU+Ethernet performance without any disk involvement: this showed no improvement from SPARCstation 1 to SPARCstation 1+ (despite increasing the rating from 12 MIPS to 16 MIPS), and the fastest machine of all (296 units vs 273) was a Mac IIfx with the 64K RAM Apple card. While we're on this subject - an old Kinetics EtherPort II card which has been at our dealers under repair for over a year has now been returned.... as an new Shiva EtherPort II card (not the same thing at all!). Does anyone know where I can FTP an A/UX driver for this card, or do I have to try explaining things to my dealer? -- % William Roberts Internet: liam@dcs.qmw.ac.uk % Queen Mary & Westfield College UUCP: liam@qmw-dcs.UUCP % Mile End Road Telephone: +44 71 975 5234 % LONDON, E1 4NS, UK Fax: +44 81-980 6533