problems with 3com and intel 100MB cards

[Donald Becker]

On 9 Oct 2002, Marcin Kaczmarski wrote:

> It is a proven fact that happened at some University in Germany that the
> newly bought super linux alpha dual cluster with 3com NIC ( I do not
> know the model of these cards in this case) simply failed to operate
> while trying to run very demanding scientifical calculations in material
> science just because of cards.

As usual, my first question is "what driver version are you using"?

Random people that modify drivers often don't have an Alpha to test
with.  The often don't even seem know that there are non-x86
architectures out.  (Like the via-rhine driver modification, from VIA,
that disabled interrupts and directly polled the PC timer chip!!  With
vendor code like that, no wonder MS-Windows is so unstable.)

Saying "one specific driver version failed to work" is a much different
statement that "3Com cards don't work with Alphas".  In fact, 3Com cards
work significantly better with Alphas than the Digital Tulip chip,
thanks to 3Com's ability to receive into non-word-aligned Rx buffers.
See the design discussion at the top of the drivers for more details.
(Yes, my drivers have design documentation...)

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
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