[no subject]

| Add device driver support for the Broadcom BCM570x family of gigabit
| ethernet controllers. This adds support for the 3Com 3c996-T, the
| SysKonnect SK-9D21 and SK-9D41, and the built-in gigE NICs on
| Dell PowerEdge 2550 servers. The latter configuration hauls ass:
| preliminary measurements show TCP speeds of over 900Mbps using
| only normal size frames.
| 
| TCP/IP checksum offload, jumbo frames and VLAN tag insertion/stripping
| are supported, as well as interrupt moderation.
| 
| Still need to fix autonegotiation support for 1000baseSX NICs, but
| beyond that, driver is pretty solid.


> Hypothetically, a box that could handle, say, 750 Mb/s is not suitable
> for "core" use, but it can certainly handle more than "a couple of
> T1s."

Depends on what your core looks like.  Note that the above were TCP
speeds, not packet forwarding speeds; I assume counts for the latter
would be slightly higher.

To save you some clicking, a PowerEdge 2550 is a 2U chassis with one of
those adapters on-board connected to a 64-bit 66 MHz PCI bus, three free
64-bit 33 MHz PCI slots, dual Pentium III CPUs and oodles of ECC 133 MHz
SDRAM with memory interleaving support.


Oh, and please note that I am staying very far away from a discussion
of PC vs. Cisco equipment quality and software reliability.  :-)

Regards,


        -- Niels.