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Coping some files with a ne2k card on linux, pentium 133mhz caused mp3 playing to go bonkers from being overload. Switching to a better card fixed it. Was it t
by knorker 6y ago
Coping some files with a ne2k card on linux, pentium 133mhz caused mp3 playing to go bonkers from being overload. Switching to a better card fixed it.
Was it the hw, or the driver? Shrug, I don't know. But the experience sucked.
- tyingq 6y agoAn ne2k uses programmed io, where your cpu is constantly interacting in a fifo way with it. Shared memory or bus master cards are easier on the CPU. Some compute and pass checksums too, which offloads more cpu.
- anyfoo 6y agoYeah, but as called out in the article, ISA (8257 style) DMA wasn't a good option either. And carving out address space came with its own set of problems, especially if you needed this to work on DOS (with maybe Windows on top)--which was pretty much the default at the time. PCI made most of that go away with its introduction, hence me wondering what the replacement card was.
- oso2k 6y agoProbably something with a rtl8129/39/69 chip. I had a few dozens of those NICs in the late 90s and early 2000s university computer labs I worked at. They’re so common that they’re (almost) a standard in x86 emulation (see qemu, VirtualBox, etc.).
- anyfoo 6y agoYeah, those are PCI.
- rasz 6y agoThose realteks are internally still clones on NE2000, with some realtek tweaks and addons.
- Taniwha 6y agothey still had linux kernel bugs, I remember having to port a freebsd fix to linux to get it to work in a cloud/farm application where collisions could make ALL the cards on every devices go out to lunch for 10 minutes
- nikau 6y agoAhh the good old days, I remember running a utility on Linux to set the IRQ priority of my serial port to highest to stop dropped packets when the HD or network card were busy.
- anyfoo 6y agoOut of curiosity, did you maybe switch to a PCI card? DMA was just a better option in general with PCI than ISA, so just switching to a PCI card could likely relieve your CPU of work (unless the PCI card/driver weren't completely crap).
- knorker 6y agoThis was almost a quarter century ago, but as I recall this was even with a PCI card. I could be completely wrong, though. But yes we knew then that ISA was crap, relatively speaking. :-)
- AnotherGoodName 6y agoNote that PIO hard drive modes that were unintentionally common back then would also lead to this. You used to have to go out of your way and meddle with specific drivers to avoid PIO mode. You could have even ended up with a double whammy if not careful. Your hard drive and network might both have relied on the CPU for data transfer in which case the system would really have ground to a halt.