Re: eepro100 vs. ntulip speed

[Bob Edwards <Robert.Edwards@anu.edu.au>]

Thanks to all who replied to my enquiry about the suspect speed of
the ntulip driver. Paul Mackerras of Linuxcare's OZLabs (and the guy who
ported Linux to the PPC) sat down with me earlier in the day and helped
me figure out what was wrong (he has contributed to the de4x5 driver).

Basically, there were three main problems:
 - udelay was broken.
 - ntulip_transmit doesn't need to stop and start the transmitter for
	each frame
 - ntulip_transmit doesn't need to wait 300us (actually ~3800us) before
	returning, it can simply wait until the frame has gone.

With these changes to ntulip.c, we have now got the 5.4MB download time
down from 42+ seconds to 10.5 seconds. Still not as good as the eepro100
driver (at 3.6 seconds), but a lot better (over 30 seconds less per boot).

I will forward the patches onto Ken as soon as I have them formatted
correctly.

btw. if anyone is interested in our Beowulf project, there are some web
pages available at:

http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Beowulf

including some piccies and some info about how Etherboot is used (more to
follow in the coming weeks).

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.
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