tulip question: tulip.o vs de4x5.o

tulip question: tulip.o vs de4x5.o

[Justin Piszcz]

Which driver is recommended for a 4 port card?

Each driver works, I have not benchmarked performance with one over the 
other with ttcp yet; however, does anyone have any experience with using 
one over the other? I see the tulip has several options and the de4x5 
seems to be a rather generic driver.

<M>   DECchip Tulip (dc2114x) PCI support
[*]     New bus configuration (EXPERIMENTAL)
[*]     Use PCI shared mem for NIC registers 
[*]     Use NAPI RX polling 
[*]       Use Interrupt Mitigation

vs.

<M>   Generic DECchip & DIGITAL EtherWORKS PCI/EISA

-rw-r--r--  1 root root 55095 2004-11-23 08:37 de4x5.ko
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 53856 2004-11-23 08:37 tulip.ko


Any suggestions?

Re: tulip question: tulip.o vs de4x5.o

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1106 bytes --]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 12:28:54 -0500, Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
wrote in message <Pine.LNX.4.61.0411231216470.3740@p500>:
> Each driver works, I have not benchmarked performance with one over the 
> other with ttcp yet; however, does anyone have any experience with using 
> one over the other? I see the tulip has several options and the de4x5 
> seems to be a rather generic driver.

The de4x5 driver supports some older revisions of the tulip chipset
which aren't supported by the tulip driver. I guess it could be made to
support those, too, but nobody did that up to now.

You can actually see the difference on older Alphas: de4x5 works while
tulip doesn't transmit or receive a single packet (getting netdev
watchdogs later on...).

MfG, JBG

-- 
Jan-Benedict Glaw       jbglaw@lug-owl.de    . +49-172-7608481             _ O _
"Eine Freie Meinung in  einem Freien Kopf    | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg  _ _ O
 fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! |   im Irak!   O O O
ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(NEW_COPYRIGHT_LAW | DRM | TCPA));

[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: tulip question: tulip.o vs de4x5.o

[Jeff Garzik]

Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-11-23 12:28:54 -0500, Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
> wrote in message <Pine.LNX.4.61.0411231216470.3740@p500>:
> 
>>Each driver works, I have not benchmarked performance with one over the 
>>other with ttcp yet; however, does anyone have any experience with using 
>>one over the other? I see the tulip has several options and the de4x5 
>>seems to be a rather generic driver.
> 
> 
> The de4x5 driver supports some older revisions of the tulip chipset
> which aren't supported by the tulip driver. I guess it could be made to
> support those, too, but nobody did that up to now.

Incorrect, the older chips are supported by the de2104x driver.

de4x5 will be going away.


> You can actually see the difference on older Alphas: de4x5 works while
> tulip doesn't transmit or receive a single packet (getting netdev
> watchdogs later on...).

That's a bug in tulip.

	Jeff

Re: tulip question: tulip.o vs de4x5.o

[Justin Piszcz]

Thanks for all the feedback, I am using the tulip driver, it seems to be 
working well.

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
>> On Tue, 2004-11-23 12:28:54 -0500, Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
>> wrote in message <Pine.LNX.4.61.0411231216470.3740@p500>:
>> 
>>> Each driver works, I have not benchmarked performance with one over the 
>>> other with ttcp yet; however, does anyone have any experience with using 
>>> one over the other? I see the tulip has several options and the de4x5 
>>> seems to be a rather generic driver.
>> 
>> 
>> The de4x5 driver supports some older revisions of the tulip chipset
>> which aren't supported by the tulip driver. I guess it could be made to
>> support those, too, but nobody did that up to now.
>
> Incorrect, the older chips are supported by the de2104x driver.
>
> de4x5 will be going away.
>
>
>> You can actually see the difference on older Alphas: de4x5 works while
>> tulip doesn't transmit or receive a single packet (getting netdev
>> watchdogs later on...).
>
> That's a bug in tulip.
>
> 	Jeff
>
>
>

Re: tulip question: tulip.o vs de4x5.o

[Lech Szychowski]

> >You can actually see the difference on older Alphas: de4x5 works while
> >tulip doesn't transmit or receive a single packet (getting netdev
> >watchdogs later on...).
> 
> That's a bug in tulip.

Speaking of bugs in tulip: I am still unable to use tulip driver
from 2.4.28 on my x86 SMP box (Asus P2B-DS) with Adaptec AN-6944A/TX
network card. While de4x5 works fine, with tulip at least one of the
Ethernet interfaces is unable to send/receive packets. More details
available on request.

-- 
	Leszek.

-- lech7@pse.pl 2:480/33.7          -- REAL programmers use INTEGERS --
-- speaking just for myself...