[vortex] Dual port 3c920

[Paul English]

> > I have a Beowulf cluster with Tyan S2462 motherboards, each with dual 
> > 3c920 onboard. I am currently using only one of them on each system, and I 
> > would like to improve the interconnect speed of the system overall as it 
> > is a bottleneck.
> 
> I assume you mean bonding. This will increase bandwidth, but latency will 
> remain the same.

I'll go for whatever will give me an increase in bandwidth and/or latency. 
I understood that bonding would need to be supported on both the switch 
and the NIC, and I'd also need to buy a new switch to replace the current 
one with twice the number of ports, rather than a second smaller one to 
supplement. 

> No. They should appear as 2 NICs (like eth0 and eth1).

Helpful to know!

> > Also has anyone had any luck getting the mvia driver working for this 
> > board ?
> 
> For some time I tried to track down development in the low-latency-on-FE 
> department (basically M-VIA and GAMMA), but time constraints forced me to 
> stop. I think that I was able to compile the 3c59x driver from some 
> earlier version of  M-VIA, around 1.0 with the actual kernel at that time.
> 
> 
Aaah, i'll take a look at Gamma. I believe that Mvia only supported these 
3com nics in the latest beta version, not before that, so you may have 
been using it with another nic? The tulips have been supported for a 
while. 

Paul