> You won't do any better than fast ethernet when you're using a > crossover cable. Gigabit ethernet doesn't need crossover cables for > direct connections, it uses all four wire pairs in cat5 cable and will > automatically figure out if there's a direct connection and do the > right thing (all mandatory by the gigE standard, so every NIC will > support it). If you use a fast ethernet cross cable, the NICs will > autonegotiate to 100 MB/s full-duplex. I did not know that auto-sensing was part of the Gigabit standard. I don't understand why you would think that performance would be worse with a crossover than a straight cable, though. I assure you, the link autonegotiates to a gigabit connection. The card driver reports this, the card's light indicator reports this, and my benchmarking of throughput has proven it. > The Intel gigE NICs are very good: good hardware, good driver, good > support. Gigabit ethernet switches are becoming rather cheap: 200 EUR > buys you an 8 port switch. Yeah, I knew Intel made good NIC's, and I knew they were linux supported. I'm only worried because this is the lowest end model in the line. I wonder if it offloads work to the CPU, causing lower throughput on a busy link, while more expensive versions handle more work on the card. Also, I have read some traffic that the e1000 driver is better tuned for light duty connections, and could use some improvement under a heavy workload. If you knew about any documentation, or mailing lists on the topic of tuning this, I'd appreciate it. TJ Harrell - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
