onboard NICs to stay away from?

[c]

On Tuesday, August 6, 2002, at 01:13  PM, Jim Lux wrote:

> Does anyone have a handy list of particularly bad motherboard 
> componentry to stay away from?
>
> What would be useful is to know things like:
>
> Especially crippled on-board LAN interfaces (i.e. the drivers don't 
> work, it's badly implemented, no possibility for booting over LAN, etc.)

Most of the onboard NICs I've had with motherboards have worked fine, 
but some notes:
Intel e1000 (gigabit) chipset: driver only seems to work as a kernel 
module, but works fine
The e100 (100mbit, EtherExpress Pro?): has two drivers, on some newer 
versions of the chipset you must choose the intel-provided driver, but 
it works fine (I believe the two drivers are eepro and e100)
3c980/3c920: at one point I had to enable extra non-3c905/59x 3com 
drivers to get these to work properly, but that was in the 2.2.x days

It seems to be generally accepted that realtek ethernet chipsets are not 
terribly good, but I have no actual experience with them and don't 
specifically remember any boards with onboard realtek ethernet

I have had good luck with any 3com or intel onboard LAN chipsets, as 
have many others.

Chris