Can’t help it, but this network card
just appeals to me. The specially designed heatsink and the fact that it runs an onboard version of linux calls out to a geeky side of me I never even knew existed. Unfortunatly the linux host driver are not available yet, but their FAQ promises it sometimes this fall.
Christian F.K. Schaller
Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.
Sounds like snake oil to me.
I’m not entirely sure what your role is, but I seriously hope your superiors are considering stripping you of any real responsibility after comments like this.
The kernel folk have traditionally been against adding support for this kind of thing to the mainline kernel. Not only would it require lots of hooks everywhere, but once it was working it would be bypassing all of the kernel code and features you might want to use. And in 6 months a new CPU will beat it, anyway.
On the geeky side, that network card has twice the CPU speed and memory of my first PC, and over 100x the CPU speed and memory of the first computers I used.
Plus it has “Nickel-Plated Aluminum”. Shiny.
So it reduces the load on the main CPU by pushing some jobs off to a second CPU. Now the test system they mention is a 2.6GHz single core Athlon-64, so the network stack would be competing for CPU time with a single thread application in this case.
But today SMP machines are common. What if the network stack isn’t competing with the app for CPU time? That would be a much more interesting comparison.
that sounds like snake oil indeed. not to say
it sounds like utter bullshit. what’s the point
of running linux on the nic? why is that supposed
to be faster as the logic in silicon?
oh boy .. it’s just a hoax probably.
It might be snake-oil, but to me it was just the concept of the card that I found enticing. My comment was not about the true technical qualities or not, its kinda how a lot of people get a glass wall and blue leds in their computer box, it has nothing to do with functionality only with style :) A network card is today just plain commodity and this card sorta goes to the opposite end of that.
Also be aware that I will not be getting this card, only having a laptop it wouldn’t be very usefull to me no matter what :)