8139 Driver Improvements

8139 Driver Improvements

[Ryan Cumming]

Hi,

    I'd just like to say that the 8139 Ethernet driver in 2.4.15pre3 is 
vastly improved over the driver included in the Linux ~2.4.8 timeframe. On my 
486DX2/80 running 2.4.8, the card would have impresssive burst performance, 
but buffer overruns would quickly drop the TCP throughput down to around 
1KB/second with heavy latency. Adjusting the all the /proc tuning knobs would 
do very little to improve performance, and I understandably blamed it on my 
shoddy hardware. I had similar results in FreeBSD, although I didn't know my 
way around enough to tune it terribly well.

I just upgraded the machines kernel to 2.4.15pre3 (to match my desktop). Now, 
the same setup can push 440KB/sec without breaking a sweat, and this is just 
a simple HTTP file transfer using the default /proc-tunable settings. So, 
hats off to Jeff Garzik and anyone else who has hacked on that driver and/or 
the TCP/IP stack.

-Ryan