I wish they had tracked down someone from Nat Semi for this. I imagine they would have been somewhat dismayed by some of this.
One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.
(Russia, 1996, an IT services company) At some point we got a box of no-name NE2000 cards in OEM packaging with just one floppy with a driver in the box. That driver was magical - it was able to configure pretty much any NE2000 even the brandname ones which were PITA to configure with their own drivers.
The Intel PRO/100 NICs using the 82557, 82558, and 82559 controllers were a joy to work with on Windows. The NICs performed well and there was some backwards compatibility in the drivers. I have a vague memory of a lockup bug in some Linux driver versions that would knock machines off the network but it was eventually fixed.
I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switches were economical and reliable. It really made no sense for them to be in that market, and they ultimately ditched it, but I liked the simple and inexpensive gear.
The first chassis switch I ever used was the XLNT Millennium that Intel acquired and rebranded as the Intel "6000 Series". At a time when gigabit Ethernet was still exotic getting to play with one in a lab was a treat.
Aside: Videos like this leave me with this "Gee, I could've done that" feeling. It would probably be fun to divest myself of the old junk I have sitting around by way or making videos about the stuff before I liquidate it.
In this era 3Com was still the gold standard, but intel eventually dominated the market because they integrated 100mbit and then gigabit on the PCH relegating any margin in the expansion card market to servers. As someone that has worked on a lot of Intel drivers I always find Intel being put on a pedestal to be a little amusing, they have a tendency to make a lot of gaffes in silicon and sometimes these reappear in followup designs. It's certainly not bad, but I would place Intel networking about mid-tier historically and today.
Most realtek is F tier, they basically repeat the bad part of this NE2000 saga, and the simplicity comes at the cost of CPU cycles. In that sense the Intel PCH controllers were great.
The bug on Linux still exists today on this family (e100, e1000, e1000e). Maybe the root cause is different, but the solution is still to disable TCP segmentation offload and I suppose this is a firmware bug. At some point, Mellanox took over the "top" card segment for servers.
I've assumed it worked fine on Linux but your comment brought me to this after a quick search: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118721. I've not seen any major issues on Linux e1000e defaults but never pushed it harder than laptop usage. I've occasionally tried to make em(4) TSO work on FreeBSD (it works fine on igb(4)) but gave up due to stalls. Linux has GSO (maybe invented partially due to those issues?) so the benefit is a lot smaller there.
I wish they had tracked down someone from Nat Semi for this. I imagine they would have been somewhat dismayed by some of this.
One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.
(Russia, 1996, an IT services company) At some point we got a box of no-name NE2000 cards in OEM packaging with just one floppy with a driver in the box. That driver was magical - it was able to configure pretty much any NE2000 even the brandname ones which were PITA to configure with their own drivers.
Half the Internet was running on these in the mid-90s. Every Linux and BSD PC had one stuffed in it.
And then somewhat later, when things moved to 100Mbps, the 3c905b and 3c905c-tx
I love your video. It bring me so good memories.
I quite like these in-depth videos on the history of a particular card... would be nice to see one on the Intel PRO/100 next.
If you like this kind of thing I also highly recommend this 43 minute history of Creative and the Sound Blaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPa6wRECw0
The Intel PRO/100 NICs using the 82557, 82558, and 82559 controllers were a joy to work with on Windows. The NICs performed well and there was some backwards compatibility in the drivers. I have a vague memory of a lockup bug in some Linux driver versions that would knock machines off the network but it was eventually fixed.
I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switches were economical and reliable. It really made no sense for them to be in that market, and they ultimately ditched it, but I liked the simple and inexpensive gear.
The first chassis switch I ever used was the XLNT Millennium that Intel acquired and rebranded as the Intel "6000 Series". At a time when gigabit Ethernet was still exotic getting to play with one in a lab was a treat.
Aside: Videos like this leave me with this "Gee, I could've done that" feeling. It would probably be fun to divest myself of the old junk I have sitting around by way or making videos about the stuff before I liquidate it.
In this era 3Com was still the gold standard, but intel eventually dominated the market because they integrated 100mbit and then gigabit on the PCH relegating any margin in the expansion card market to servers. As someone that has worked on a lot of Intel drivers I always find Intel being put on a pedestal to be a little amusing, they have a tendency to make a lot of gaffes in silicon and sometimes these reappear in followup designs. It's certainly not bad, but I would place Intel networking about mid-tier historically and today.
Realtek then dominated by being cheaper and simpler than Intel; they had the majority of the NIC marketshare (70%+) in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Most realtek is F tier, they basically repeat the bad part of this NE2000 saga, and the simplicity comes at the cost of CPU cycles. In that sense the Intel PCH controllers were great.
I had some EtherExpress cards, bought new circa 1993. They had a lifetime warranty which Intel honoured sometime around 2005.
Rock-solid drivers - can’t think of a single platform they didn’t run on.
The bug on Linux still exists today on this family (e100, e1000, e1000e). Maybe the root cause is different, but the solution is still to disable TCP segmentation offload and I suppose this is a firmware bug. At some point, Mellanox took over the "top" card segment for servers.
I've assumed it worked fine on Linux but your comment brought me to this after a quick search: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118721. I've not seen any major issues on Linux e1000e defaults but never pushed it harder than laptop usage. I've occasionally tried to make em(4) TSO work on FreeBSD (it works fine on igb(4)) but gave up due to stalls. Linux has GSO (maybe invented partially due to those issues?) so the benefit is a lot smaller there.
There's a comical change where Intel downclocked DMA to fix some issue and it makes TSO max out at ~700mbps: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... but they later disable TSO there with https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Those Intel cards were the number 1 choice on openbsd back then too.
They did have someone from Intel on when covering Intel's switches and he brings up his involvement in the Pro/100.