Is anyone making a compactPCI GigE card that works with Solaris 9/10? The
Sun cPCI GigE card costs around $3000 used and an entire 3800 loaded costs
$2800!

We would like to upgrade some old 4500s and the 3800 is a very cost
effective solution, but the GigE card is an issue.

Brian Elfert

Brian Elfert wrote:

I have posted a similar message a while ago. Everyone recommended the
Netgear GA311. This card can be purchased on eBay for around £15
(GBP).

I gave it a go. It work~ish. I have two diferent platforms: Ultra 5 and
Blade 100, both with Solaris 10 6/06. The card is recognized by the
operating system (no OPB, hence you cannot use it to boot from the
net).

In both cases it works OK if hooked to a gigabit switch, on a 10/100
switch it takes several attempts to synchronize (link up, link down,
link up, link down).

In Blade 1000, everything seems fine until I transfer large files, than
the OS starts complaining about "spurious interrupts" firing hundreds
of messages to /var/adm/messages. For that reason I removed it.

in Ultra 5, it works OK, no spurious interrupts, BUT ... if I do a warm
reboot (init 6, or init 0 and than manual boot), the box fails to boot
throwing several PCI errors and indicating the network adapter as
failing. If I power cycle everything boots OK once again.

In any case this is the max throughput that I get, testing with plain
FTP transfer:

Blade 1000: internal eri0: 10 MB/s; GA311 rge0: 32 MB/s

Ultra 5: internal hme0: 10 MB/s; GA311 rge0: 12MB/s with some peaks to
16MB/s

In both cases one CPU is utilized 100%, having the Ultra 5 only a
440MHz US II, explains why it is so slow. The CPU is a real bottleneck.

Please find below a link to a white paper that I have found around GBE
performance on Sun UltraSparc boxes:

"http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~hungsh/2001%20SUPerG.pdf#search=%22sun%20ultrasparc%20gig abit%20performance%22"

I hope this helps.

I have tried also a D-Link GBE card, but it did not get recognized. Now
I am wating for an Intel PRO/1000 that I have ordered. Solaris 10 has a
driver, I hope this one will work better. I will report here on the
results.

HD

"haydude" <haydude@alpensea.com> writes:



I need a CompactPCI card, not a PCI card. The Sun branded PCI GigE cards
are pretty cheap on Ebay. I would not consider anything but a Sun branded
card if I had PCI slots.

Brian Elfert