Intel Pro/1000 Network Adapter Differences?

jfave

Petyr · Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 5:55 pm Post subject:

All those cards depend greatly on what the server is going to be doing. Basically as the price of the card increases, more crap is done directly on the card (rather than on the CPU). Also you get some extra things like SNMP features and crap like that. The snmp stuff is just so you can set features on the cards for a large collection of them, from one station. Kinda like "I want to enable some oddball QoS function on all cards in this server group" or something like that.

Depending on what you're doing you may or may not need the quad port or dual port stuff. Also keep in mind that a good collection of servers already have Gb cards built in (i.e. just about every dell computer now-a-days has Gb Eth built in)

Sometimes the higher end server cards have some ipsec chips on there as well, to make things a little easier on the server when it's routing a lot of encrypted traffic.

hth,
Petyr

jfave · Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 7:16 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the reply. I unfortunately have no use for the dual/quad port for my machine. I totally agree with having more computing power on the NIC. I have bad memories of trying to get winmodems to work with redhat.
Is it worth the money to put a Server card in my machine if it is for home server use (should have mentioned that earlier) ? What sort of performance hit would I see in the different cards? Would it be significant?
I would ideally like to map several drives from the server to the win box... making it (hopefully) transparent. I also have several 100mb machines on the network. I want everything to run at full speed and have zero bottlenecks.

Suicidal · l33t Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 959 Location: /dev/null

You also want to check with the more advanced NIC's whether the Linux kernel driver even supports the hardware offloads. My old 3c990 typhoon never supportted the TCP seg or the IPsec offloads.

Look in /usr/src/linux/Documentation for docs on the nics you are looking at and what advanced features are supported by the kernel driver.

Most likely you will only find TX/RX offloads but it makes a substancial difference on a big transfer. On windows my integrated nic will use 70% cpu (on a opteron 146) my old and dead 3com 3c990 used about ~5% on the same file on a p3 800. I miss that NIC. :cry:

As far as the dual port NIC's you are right you probably dont need them unless you have multiple subnets or a non blocking switch that is capable of server load balancing or trunking.

jfave · Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:05 pm Post subject:

thanks for the tip! I'll check that after work.

jfave · Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 10:20 pm Post subject:

the file has LOTS of good info. Here is what I found to be relevent:

jfave · Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 10:25 pm Post subject:

more info, from the Intel site:
http://support.intel.com/support/network/sb/CS-012904.htm

and download the linux drivers:
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Product_Search.asp?Prod_nm=pro*1000

driver info:
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?agr=Y&Inst=Yes&ProductID=841&DwnldID=2897