[rescue] best NIC for Solaris/x86?

[Sean Batt]

On 05/05/2005, at 12:00 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 11:52:43AM +1000, Sean Batt wrote:
>>> Broadcom gigabit works fine. Really, I haven't found anything from
>>> broadcom, 3com or intel that dont work.
>>
>> The Broadcom gigabit chip in the Dell GX280 doesn't work with
>> Sol 10 x86 and the driver available from Broadcom's site works
>> for a few minutes before Solaris generates a wordy kernel error
>> message about dma being used incorrectly by the driver, "report
>> this to your vendor."
>
> Get the freeware driver for Solaris 10, not the one from Broadcom.  I
> have 2 Opteron systems with Broadcom in production and no problems so
> far.  I think you will have to Google for it...

Been there, tried that. Doesn't support the chipset in the GX280:

Vendor:  0x14E4 Broadcom	
Device Id: 0x1677
Chip Number: 	BCM5751x
Chip Description: 	NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express

Incidentally, the driver from Broadcom doesn't install cleanly
as there's a conflict with some of the drivers already installed
in Sol 10. I had to fiddle the add driver script or config file
or whatever to get it to install.

I think the lesson I've learned is that a GX280 isn't a very nice
machine to work with unless you're running Windows. Not that it
plays nice with Ghost to allow simple installation of Windows
either... USB driver problems, NIC driver problems.

Sean
--
Sean at coombs.anu.edu.au