Get an Ethernet Card

[Matthew Hawkins]

Alex Satrapa (grail at goldweb.com.au) wrote:
> At least the Tulip chipset is busmastering/DMA, so the processor doesn't 
> have to actually load the data into the card.  The greatest claim to 

Actually, it does.  What it doesn't have to do, though, is handle an
interrupt for every byte of data (unlike the Realtek 8029).  I'm not
sure how much memory space the cards have, but it would at least have to
be enough to hold 3000 bytes (two frames) otherwise full-duplex
operation would be a joke!

The newer Tulip driver in the kernel also has the (experimental) ability
to use the PCI shared memory regions for the NIC registers so the PIO
interface doesn't have to be used to access them, this is a very new
feature.  Not sure what operations this would speed up, haven't looked
at the driver source yet.

-- 
Matt
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