Hello maniac, and thanks for the assist on the network card
information.  It seems only fair to share a bit of the booty
(especially given the time of year), so please answer with some
factoid or other -- perhaps your favorite NIC.

Cheers.

pafalafa-ga

Hello Palafala,

Thank you for the kind words and the opportunity to answer another question.

Hmm. My favorite NIC - that is a difficult question. There is a real
interesting issue related to where the processing should be done
 - in the network card
 - in the CPU
The improvements in performance appear to be done more rapidly in
CPU's than network cards so a simple card that is easy for the CPU to
interface with would be "better" in the long run.

There are obviously "smart" cards that do a lot of functions such as
 - checksum computation and checks
 - filtering packets
 - scatter / gather (e.g., the header in one place, the data in another)
 - multiple messages with one interrupt
that reduce the CPU loading, but if the design is not sound, the card
becomes the bottleneck instead of the CPU.

At this point, I tend to get the best I can reasonably afford.
Separately, I am looking at using 1000 Mbit ethernet for all new
purchases since the price / performance is getting quite good. The
Intel (E1000) NIC's are quite good for that purpose. I have also had
some pretty good experience with Acenic products but the driver
support on Linux was a little spotty for a while.

I hope that gives you some additional background into the system
effects of how a NIC needs to fit into the overall design and a couple
of recommendations of products.

Good luck with your work.
  --Maniac

Perfect answer...I understood almost half of it.  Thanks.