[MinnowBoard] [MinnowBoard Max] Ethernet controller

[selsinork at gmail.com]

On 23/06/14 18:50, Darren Hart wrote:

> For what it's worth, in our testing so far, the chip has performed well
> and I haven't observed any problems. Is there a specific use case you
> would like to see tested?

copy some large files (10+ GB) both to and from the board using nfs/ftp/scp 
while both source/destination are connected to each other with a gigabit 
network. Closer you can get to wirespeed the better, reading at 8MB/s off 
an SD card isn't going to cut it.

I previously gave up with realtek gigabit adapters due to that sort of 
traffic causing either the transmit or recieve queue in the chip to stall
and block all traffic. It took a large transfer to show the problem and 
would recover if you halted the transfer.
The chip would still pass traffic in the opposite direction while one
direction was blocked, but that's not particularly useful.
Didn't cause an issue at 100Mb, so probably not seen by many people at 
the time as realtek chips were typically used on consumer hardware.

I switched to intel e1000e cards which 'just work', so I've not tried 
realtek in quite some time, maybe things have changed. Either way, I'd 
be interested in your results.

I'll admit that seeing your confirmation that it was a realtek chip had 
almost convinced me to cross the Max off my list..

I take it there's no mac in the chipset unlike a lot of other intel 
stuff then? 
Even if the chipset mac rarely seems to get used, I usually think it'll 
be better than a realtek :)