Hi,
I'd just like to say that the 8139 Ethernet driver in 2.4.15pre3 is
vastly improved over the driver included in the Linux ~2.4.8 timeframe. On my
486DX2/80 running 2.4.8, the card would have impresssive burst performance,
but buffer overruns would quickly drop the TCP throughput down to around
1KB/second with heavy latency. Adjusting the all the /proc tuning knobs would
do very little to improve performance, and I understandably blamed it on my
shoddy hardware. I had similar results in FreeBSD, although I didn't know my
way around enough to tune it terribly well.
I just upgraded the machines kernel to 2.4.15pre3 (to match my desktop). Now,
the same setup can push 440KB/sec without breaking a sweat, and this is just
a simple HTTP file transfer using the default /proc-tunable settings. So,
hats off to Jeff Garzik and anyone else who has hacked on that driver and/or
the TCP/IP stack.
-Ryan