[vortex] Correct 3c905 model?

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Rodrigo Severo wrote:

> Which model to I have exactly? I am sending the output of vortex-diag -aemf.

As the output says, you have a Boomerang card a.k.a 3C905 (no letter).  
This is an older generation card with MII (including autonegotiation) on a
separate chip as opposed to included on-chip for 3C905C; this however
doesn't make so much of a difference. The bigger difference might be in
the DMA engine; the newer 3C905B and 3C905C can poll a memory location to
find out if a new packet is queued while the older cards like the 3C905
need the CPU to actively do I/O, which means lots of CPU cycles wasted for
today's fast CPUs - this feature is used by the Scyld driver, not used by
the driver distributed with the kernel. The newer cards (905B and 905C) 
also have a better (and more customizable) usage of the PCI bus.

These are all theoretical differences. As I don't have any Boomerang card, 
I cannot comment on the difference that it makes in practice...

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De