[rescue] Gigabit Ethernet SBus & Gigabit Ethernet Sun 420R/220R

[Jonathan Katz]

On Apr 6, 2008, at 10:46 AM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> It's megabits, remember, not megabytes.
>
> I have gotten an honest 97Mbit/s data rate across my local 100Mbit  
> network.  That's about 12 MB/s.  If GigE can manage 900Mbit/s  
> actual throughput, that's 112MB/s.  So if SBUS tops out at 200MB/s,  
> it should take GigE traffic just fine.  If that's 200Mbit/s, then  
> GigE on SBUS isn't going to work too well.  :)

I feel like a broken record. I know I've posted this story 2x before :D

Back in 1997 I was a contractor at Alteon networks. We had Tatung  
Ultra 2 clones with the 336Mhz(?) CPUs in them. They were sbus  
systems. With the sbus gigabit cards using 8k frames (jumbo frames)  
and ttcp we could hard-lock the systems and managed to get 800Mbits  
of throughput. This was back in the Solaris 2.5.1 days with 32bit  
kernels, too, and rev 1.x drivers.

Other caveats at the time were that you wanted at least two CPUs in  
the system because one would be busy managing the network traffic,  
even though it would work fine with one CPU.

With those memories fondly in the back of my brain I'm thinking we  
could easily hit 900Mbits or greater with our more refined OSes and  
drivers (and more typical network traffic than ttcp blasting) and  
still have a very functional system.

-Jon