Re:Little Lance Patch & Cyrix

Tekno Soft Snc (MC3641@mclink.it)
Sat, 18 Jan 97 13:57:34 CET


la> For an ISA bus machine however (with no power
la> saving stuff involved) they are the fastest cards
la> you'll get.
la> When I built a high spec 386 machine (thats a
la> while ago) it was built with a bus mastering SCSI
la> controller (AHA1542), and bus mastering Lance.
la> Under very heavy disk load the lance lost packets.
la> It still outperformed an NE2000 overall

If other ISA cards uses bus mastering, the lance cards
have problem with long latency. My previous ISA lance
card have the same problem with the Qic02 streaming tape.
During a backup I get many lost packets and bus master
arbitration failure, so I buy a new PCI lance card :-)) !

la> On PCI DMA bandwidth is very rarely an issue. I've
la> only seen one report of PCI lance people seeing
la> that message and that was using a frame grabber
la> from hell writing pretty much raw NTSC video onto
la> a disk array.

The PCI lance have a "Latency Register", so we can
tune it with an appropriate value.

Roberto Fichera - email MC3641@mclink.it

Xmeo ver.3.0 Alpha for Linux & Windows