4 ms·
somewhat related, but can anyone tell me why PCEngines specifically use Intel nics in their ALIX systems? surely realtek and other players have caught up to th
by nimbius 5y ago
somewhat related, but can anyone tell me why PCEngines specifically use Intel nics in their ALIX systems? surely realtek and other players have caught up to them by now for the performance envelope of the board.
- detaro 5y agoDriver support and stability.
- dannyw 5y agoTry using a realtek NIC on a BSD system and see how many days before your networking softlocks. Also some distros just don't include the drivers. I had to build the realtek 2.5gbe drivers from source, on an unnetworked system, last month! Latest ubuntu distro.
- stragies 5y agoAfaik, the Intel Network cards are more like dedicated CPUs, that can run various "programs", one of which is "standard, fully-transparent network card". If signed with the right key, some can run entire stacks, such as iSCSI, FCoE and others. The Multiport ones can do switching, filtering, and some basic routing in hardware. The "other" operating system is totally unencumbered by this. This is routinely used by e.g. Intel AMT/ME, which programs the network card to reroute some destination ports to (in this case internal) recipients (the ME-processor). That feature is what makes out-of-band management possible for people having added the right keys to ME, or knowing one of the preinstalled ones. And as a HW-Vendor you never know; maybe your client might one day want to use these "offloading" features. Maybe he just doesn't know it yet... So when the good offer from Intel comes in, you go for it.