pfSense

Greetings,

On some mother boards, with multiport 21143 based NIC cards, there seem to be driver problems. Symptoms include incorrect mac addresses, and not auto sensing link speed / carrier, which makes the affected ports unusable. For me this happens with an Intel D510MO Atom board and my Dlink DFE-570TX, or PB0554E HEWLETT-PACKARD 4 PORT 10/100 cards. Only two out of the four ports work. I reported it recently in the forum here:

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,62722.0.html

Though you will see this problem has been around for many years:

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7916.msg44464.html#msg44464
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,21526.msg111131.html#msg111131
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,455.0.html
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,4595.0.html
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,455.msg2795.html#msg2795

It may be related to the 21143s history outlined here: http://www.holland-consulting.net/tech/ocep/21143.html

I tend to agree with a quote by Henning in one of his messages on the subject, "This chip and the cards based on it are too great not to be used due to a silly driver bug." If you need a good card for a good price, the challenges are worth the trouble. Further, the 21143 is used in many (most?) Quad-port NICs (four complete 10/100 Ethernet ports on one card), and this is a good reason to look at these chips.

I suppose it's actually a FreeBSD issue, but I'm an avid pfSense user and I hope posting it here will help spark discussions in both groups on finding a solution. The bottom line is running Linux and using the tulip driver these cards have no problems and a consistent throughput on all ports slightly over 94 Mb/s.

I have included some test results in the attached files.

Thanks,
   Clif