Get an Ethernet Card

[Alex Satrapa]

On Saturday, September 7, 2002, at 12:19 , Matthew Hawkins wrote:

> 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).

Huh?  The processor sets up the packet to be sent in RAM, then points 
the card at the location/size of the packet, and lets the card transfer 
the data by itself.  A receive buffer works the same way - NIC says "I 
have something for you", processor says "Dump it into RAM here".

Or have I been believing the wrong thing about DMA for the last few 
years?

Alex
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