Gigabit Ethernet cards?

[Mansur, Warren]

>   Anyone here have any practical opinions on good Gigabit 
> Ethernet interface
> cards?  Likewise, bad experiences, teaching things to avoid, are also
> valuable.

I use the Intel 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller and it works great. It's actually a dual port gigabit card which makes it useful when you need another link. The one I have is a a 64 bit card.

> 
>   I'm especially interested in how well the card works with Linux.  
> Performance, stability, and driver support. Ideally, I like finding a
> full-featured, GPL driver in a mainline kernel.  Third-party 
> Open Source
> drivers are also okay.  Binary-only modules are unacceptable.

Using iperf as a testing tool, it reported a throughput of 838 Mbits/sec.

Furthermore, I experimented with ethernet bonding, and bonded the two ports on the ethernet card as one virtual interface. When connected to another machine doing the same, iperf reported a throughput of 1.36 Gbits/sec. Not too shabby.

It uses the e1000 driver which just came with Redhat. Don't know if it's GPL or what.

Regards,

Warren