100-Mbps Ethernet Performance

Some PCI motherboards contain DMA chipsets that are unable to support 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet. The Solaris environment does not support 100-Mbps PCI network operation on systems containing the slow chipsets. This problem affects PCI cards only.

These chipsets are known to exhibit this problem:

• 82430LX (Mercury)

• 82450GX (Orion) (A and B steppings only)

These chipsets do not exhibit this problem:

• 82430NX (Neptune)

• 82430FX (Triton)

• 82430HX (Triton II)

• 82440FX (Natoma)

• 82450GX (Orion) (C0 stepping and later)

In particular, PCI cards supported by the dnet, iprb, and elx drivers don't perform well on machines with the problem chipsets. If 100-Mbps operation is required on such a machine, it is best to use a non-PCI Ethernet controller. It is also possible that PCI cards supported by the ieef driver, which have larger FIFOs, may function adequately. You must decide whether the performance on a particular machine is adequate for the intended purpose.