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From: jmoore@stan.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: Smart Ethernet boards
Message-ID: <144@stan.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 11:34:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: stan.144
Posted: Mon Jul  6 11:34:30 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Jul-87 06:25:33 EDT
References: <283@sering.cwi.nl> <8212@utzoo.UUCP> <17346@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Organization: SAE Inc., Longmont, Colorado
Lines: 27
Summary: Request for a good dumb ENET board


In article <8212@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
> > WE want to know about experiences with "smart" Ethernet boards, like
> > the Interlan (Micom) NP100 or the Excelan Exos 204.
> 
> I have no direct experience with these things, but I asked a similar
> question a while ago; perhaps a quick summary of the replies I got will
> suffice for this one.
> 
> The general consensus was that, barring the special situation of a dumb
> operating system which cannot be fitted with its own networking code,
> the benefits of "smart" boards are doubtful.

Henry goes on with a good explanation of why the smart boards do
not pan out in practice. My experiences certainly back-up this 
conclusion so my question is: can anyone recommend a good "dumb"
Enet board for the VMEbus? The perfect board would be a full
A32/D32 device with a *fast* 32 bit wide DMA path. The board should present
a flexible scatter/gatter interface for direct manipulation of data
from mbufs or streams. I *do not* want to run protocols on the board;
I just want the board to get the data between memory and the wire
as quickly as possible without causing the host to copy or reformat
data.

Jim Moore
SAE, Longmont Colorado
hao!boulder!stan!jmoore