arthurking Posted December 1, 2003 Report Share Posted December 1, 2003 Just wondering if anyone has any experince, good or bad, with getting gigabit adapters to work in linux. I'm looking to get a new adapter(s) for my box(es), and I thought that I may as well go for a gigabit version. I'll look at getting a (giga)switch at a later date to get better use of the lan card(s), but that's not important. I've been searching, and the name brands that have come up in the HCL are D-link and Linksys. And I'm leaning towards D-link. I noticed a lack of interest in Linux drivers from Netgear, except for the GA302T (and its probably based on a 3-Com chip or something) even though a driver was created for the GA620 some years back by others(CERN). All I can say to Netgear is get with it dudes, you don't get any more money from me because of this, having already bought a router/firewall and 2 lan cards!! thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted December 1, 2003 Report Share Posted December 1, 2003 We've got one in our Xeon server, I can try and find out the chipset if that helps?? It was autodetected and configured by RH9. Reading the kernel docs or doing a makemenu config will help you so whats supported. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted December 2, 2003 Report Share Posted December 2, 2003 (edited) Hmmmm....dunno about gigabit from Netgear, but they seem to be very good about providing drivers for Linux for other eth cards. Anyway, I have a 3Com (3C940 10/100/1000) integrated LAN on my MoBo that works fine right out of the box with 9.1 and 9.2. I wouldn't touch a Linksys now if my life depended on it after the conversation I had with their tech support as far as their support of Linux. Edited December 2, 2003 by Steve Scrimpshire Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arthurking Posted December 2, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 2, 2003 Thanks for the replies, 3Com seems to be the the best choice, performance notwithstanding. On the Mandrake HCL, I think there's only one listing for Netgear adapter's, FA511 maybe, I'm sure many others are supported, by why not list them? Steve; how do you find the performance of the onboard GigLan, ie. can you use it at full speed? cheers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted December 3, 2003 Report Share Posted December 3, 2003 Well, I have no network to test it on right now, as it is the only Gigabit eth that I have, but I've tested all the options for the modules like full_duplex and stuff, and I get no lockups or failures. Soon, I hope to get another Gigabit card to use to test with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vdubjunkie Posted December 5, 2003 Report Share Posted December 5, 2003 Let me just say that unless you are extremely overboard in your home network, ABSOLUTELY NOBODY in a home network will get ANY use out of the additional bandwidth of gigabit. Save the money. Your hdd's even when striped will not use that bandwidth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted December 5, 2003 Report Share Posted December 5, 2003 Hmmmm....dunno about gigabit from Netgear, but they seem to be very good about providing drivers for Linux for other eth cards. Anyway, I have a 3Com (3C940 10/100/1000) integrated LAN on my MoBo that works fine right out of the box with 9.1 and 9.2. I wouldn't touch a Linksys now if my life depended on it after the conversation I had with their tech support as far as their support of Linux. I used to think the same and bought 2 wireless cards/paper weights on the strength of previous driver support from Netgear BUT they seem to have lost it.... On home gigabit..... Well why not. You are lucky to get 600Mbit/sec as opposed to 1024 but thats another story. NW bandwidth is very important and it depends what your doing. I find 10Mbit unusable at home for pre-rendered video. This is why I got the 802.11g cards becuase 10mbit just won't cut it. 100 SWITCHED is just about bareable.... its not just about disk access, I have a GIG of RAM in ALL machines except the Xbox (poor thing) and I can easily saturate the 100mbit network if I try. As I posted before, queues are bad!!! They lead to longer queues. If I copy 600MB to my server it will not be written to disk unbtil its ready and just sit in memory. (Yes of course I do that 's an ISO). I can copy directly to /tmp and know i won't be bottlenecking the disk for other tasks. Also, i boubt anyone will do this at home but 600Mbit/sec is ONLY 75MB/sec and I can quite easily get 200MB/sec out of a double 0+1 RAID using seperate SCSI controllers on different busses. Theoretically 2x USCSI360 controllers will if configured properly give more but I never bothered with SCSI-3 when I did this on an E450. In fact the E450 had 8 independent contollers on 4 busses and the other independent PCI bus having 2x bonded gigabit and the network was STILL the weak link under heavy use. This is a few years ago but eventhen we were getting 200MB/sec reads and 100MB/sec writes out of the now aincient seagate 36GB cheatahs. Although this seems pie in the ski home use has a nastly habit of catching up quicker than we predict. Back then I used a 10Mb switch at home.... now i use a 100Mb switch (actually netgear) and it gets damned hot!!! As on another thread, the hardware is pretty cheap compared to cabling. I wouldn't have lied to have installed a whole load of CAT3 5 years ago becuase now I use CAT5 .... Very soon Cat5e will be standard so when purchasing hardware I say make use of your time investement in installing the cable. Those 5e's are a pain to crimp...... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vdubjunkie Posted January 2, 2004 Report Share Posted January 2, 2004 NW bandwidth is very important and it depends what your doing. and I can easily saturate the 100mbit network if I try. I can copy directly to /tmp and know i won't be bottlenecking the disk for other tasks. Also, i boubt anyone will do this at home but 600Mbit/sec is ONLY 75MB/sec and I can quite easily get 200MB/sec out of a double 0+1 RAID using seperate SCSI controllers on different busses. Theoretically 2x USCSI360 controllers will if configured properly give more but I never bothered with SCSI-3 when I did this on an E450. I don't disagree with any of these statements for the most part. But, they do validate my point. A strong majority of home users will not be getting into any of this. I personally run 3 133 ide drives on three different channels. The drives are configured for both a large raid0 and a smaller raid 5 partitions. Each of my machines have 512MB ram which is no superbeast, but still leaves me with much to spare in normal application. I never even begin to faintly use the limits of my switched 100MB network. I run 3com 905s and a couple of reasonable linksys switches. More or less.. if you are running a render farm or real time video lab.. Go boy!! If you are doing anything like that, you don't need any of us to tell you there is advantage in gigabit with some other extreme hardware necessity. For the rest of your reading... gigabit will not help you! :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michel Posted January 2, 2004 Report Share Posted January 2, 2004 Just some info. Although it doesn't maybe matter anymore ...I BELIEVE 3com is founded or something by a/the? inventor of ethernet. But it's a standard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.