Intel cards are widely available and have good driver support. If you see an Intel card for sale, you can check on intel.com to make sure it is a current product (not discontinued) and that it supports jumbo frames.Need to buy a wired gigabit PCIe card with at least 4K 'jumbo frames' capability on its gigabit WAN, and it must work with Linux (Debian 5.0 or Ubuntu 9.04). Its for my desktop PC. Recommendations?
Intel Gigabit CT card. Very cheap, very good. I am running 4 of them and have a spare laying around somewhere. Never had an issue with them.
Doesn't apply to you, but Intel EOL it in terms of support with Windows 8.1. The driver Intel/MS supplies auto installs with the card and works very well, but the Intel networking tool kit won't install properly without some monkeying, even though it WORKS with the cards, Intel doesn't officially support it anymore (you have to download the one for Windows 8 and install it, but it works great under 8.1).
That of course doesn't apply to unix based OSs, but AFAIK lots of driver support for Debian and deffinitely for Ubuntu.
Supports up to 9k jumbo.
Hi,
Cheap Ralink chip has good Linux support as well.
Seriously, I hear SOOOOOO many Broadcom issues, both on the wired and wireless side of things (I have issues with a wireless adapter from Broadcom). I have yet to figure out why the hell they are so popular. Maybe price?
Intel understands that end users buy their cards and need drivers and support. Broadcom is really, really geared to the OEM market and the drivers on their site are simply there so they don't have to handle unwanted support calls from end users.Now I'm on a Broadcom soldered on the mobo and had to turn TSO off or else it crashes the tg3 driver when transferring at high speeds
Intel understands that end users buy their cards and need drivers and support. Broadcom is really, really geared to the OEM market and the drivers on their site are simply there so they don't have to handle unwanted support calls from end users.
The Broadcom chips are actually kind of interesting - they're complete microcontrollers and how they operate is controlled by firmware. In fact, the Broadcom diagnostics download into the microcontroller memory and run from there, directly checking the hardware. That means that most bugs can be fixed with new firmware and/or drivers.
Your best bet is determining which Broadcom chip or family you have, then looking on manufacturer web sites (for example, Dell) for the latest firmware and drivers for that chip / family.
That's really bizarre. I don't use Linux, but on FreeBSD (for example), the driver is really just the driver, not driver + firmware. It would be impossible to netboot a box if a driver had to be loaded first to feed firmware to the card.Thanks for the info. The Broadcom firmware is shipped with my kernel. It is located in /lib/firmware/tigon and in there I can find 3 firmware files (tg3.bin, tg3_tso.bin and tg3_tso5.bin). I do not know if it/they get loaded as there's nothing in dmesg. I just upgraded last night to 3.12.15 kernel but I'm reluctant in turning TSO on. I will poke at the Broadcom site to see if they have newer firmware.
You misunderstood me. I meant that Broadcom doesn't officially provide support to end users, only to OEMs. Find an OEM system that uses the same chip as your system, and download the driver and firmware update utility from there. For example, go here, select RHEL6 and expand the Network section, and you will find:As for looking at manufacturer's site. I assembled my computer myself. It uses an ASRock mobo but on their site they only offer BIOS firmware. I haven't seen any firmware for the NIC
Wide compatibility. If you are mostly looking at Linux support, the Intel Gigabit CT card. Its what I have in my server and desktop (2 each) and works great The only iffy thing is that Intel yanked Windows 8.1 support past the initial driver release. Its EOL as near as I can tell, though I think Intel still makes the cards...
Plenty of past and current Linux support on it and it'll run under Windows 8.1 and everything back through XP fine though.
As for routers...uhh, the card you are running generally isn't going to have any router or switch issues, so long as it is running the same protocol. IE, 1000base-tx, which all gigabit capable network interface cards do, unless you are looking at fiber.
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