Cisco to acquire Linksys

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: cmetz
n0cmonkey, mea culpa for misreading you. Several friends of mine have been sufficiently burned by Linksys / D-Link NICs that they won't buy 'em anymore, so when I hear people talking about their NICs, I go off and immediately assume that they're saying bad things about 'em 😉

I can understand that. As far as I can understand, I've been increadibly lucky 😉

The Linksys / D-Link / Netgear et al. NICs have not used DC2114x chips for a long time, they use various Taiwanese clones that have various bugs. The Linux tulip driver and the *BSD dc driver contain many work-arounds to deal with these bugs; some impact performance noticeably, some don't. The low-cost boards also sometimes use other chips like the RealTek. One of the many problems with the low-end boards is that you hardly ever know what the heck chip's gonna be on them, and thus, whether they're going to be supported well by your favorite non-Windows OS and whether they perform well. Of course, 99% of the users out there don't know or care, they just want cheap Ethernet that works for them, and the Linksys et al. boards meet that requirement well.

Good point. All of the Linksys cards I have purchased and tested have used a dc driver in OpenBSD. I won't touch realtek because of that 8139 POS chipset. I typically get Intel cards now, but pretty much only because Linksys agitated me when they switched the chipset in their wireless PCI boards to the broadcom chipset, which is basically unsupported in anything but Windows without marking a change on the box.

 

[cmetz]

n0cmonkey,

>Linksys agitated me when they switched the chipset in their wireless PCI boards to the
>broadcom chipset, which is basically unsupported in anything but Windows

There's some real chance that this acquisition could cause this problem to be fixed. Cisco is, I believe, Broadcom's #1 customer - if Cisco wants there to be Linux drivers, there will be Linux drivers. Internally, Cisco is a UNIX-heavy shop, and there are a whole lot of Linux users. So Cisco has been pretty decent about making Linux drivers for their products available, and it would not surprise me if eventually they cause the Linksys product line to also have full driver availability.

That's Linux, though, not BSD. If source code drivers for Linux appeared, the BSD guys would be able to do a read and rewrite. A binary-only Linux driver would do little to no good.