Hi All,

Finally I have got round with an inexpensive Gigabit Ethernet solution
for my Blade 1000.
I have tried first with a Netgear GA311 16bit PCI as recommended in a
previous posting, but they gave me several problems. I tested three
different cards coming from different suppliers.

The blade 1000 complained about "spurious interrupts" with all of them,
filling /var/adm/messages with tons of logs. I tried them on Ultra 5
and they are OK only until the next warm boot (with init 6), than the
box fails to boot reporting panic with errors related to PCI network
(GA311).

Eventually I purchased an Intel pro/1000 (PCI-X), and it works like a
charm but ...

The Blade has 2x900 MHz processors and 5GB RAM + Dual Intel pro/1000
PCI-X

I tried with a basic FTP transfer from/to a dual Pentium III 1.4MHz
running linux (having 16 bit PCI GA311) and I got max 30 MB/s with 60%
CPU taken (25% ftp process, rest is kernel), which means 100% of one
CPU and a bit of the second. The same under the Linux box was in all
taking less than 10% CPU in total.

I tried the same test between the Dual PIII 1.4 and a Dual Opteron
(Linux) and I got 90 MB/s. CPU Used on Opteron around 5%.

I had tried the same on the Blade when it had the GA311 and I got max
30 MB/s (despite the "spurious interrupt" errors).

Why is the Blade so rubbish with the network in comparison with the
Intel and AMD Linux based boxes? Isn't the former supposed to be
optimized for high bandwidth data transfer with fast DRAM, 150 MHz data
bus, etc?

HD