The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]

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65 pointsvoxadam25 comments

I wish they had tracked down someone from Nat Semi for this. I imagine they would have been somewhat dismayed by some of this.

One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.

(Russia, 1996, an IT services company) At some point we got a box of no-name NE2000 cards in OEM packaging with just one floppy with a driver in the box. That driver was magical - it was able to configure pretty much any NE2000 even the brandname ones which were PITA to configure with their own drivers.

Half the Internet was running on these in the mid-90s. Every Linux and BSD PC had one stuffed in it.

And then somewhat later, when things moved to 100Mbps, the 3c905b and 3c905c-tx

I still have a box with about a dozen of those around here somewhere; They were still useful even well into the era of on-motherboard ethernet because installing the operating system over the LAN was a lot less of a hassle than swapping CDs around and finding out that the drive or the media went flaky etc. Network boot support for the on-motherboard devices was frequently crap or just plain missing, but the 3c905 could slot a proper boot ROM. The last revs of the board even came with said boot ROM right from the factory.

I have a vague memory that there was one particular revision that had some kind of flaw which made it undesirable; It would drop DMAs or interrupts or something like that. The A revision maybe? I'll probably remember at some particularly annoying time.

and DEC Tulip!

3c509

I remember it being a bit later: like mid 90s was still a mix, things like smc-ultra and lance but by late 90s it was everywhere and well dominant. The price point was very low, I recall around AUD$20. Definitely had NE2000s running on Slackware 3.x, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Win95/98/2K.

And now their ghosts continue to live and serve in virtual machines like QEMU.

I quite like these in-depth videos on the history of a particular card... would be nice to see one on the Intel PRO/100 next.

If you like this kind of thing I also highly recommend this 43 minute history of Creative and the Sound Blaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPa6wRECw0

The Intel PRO/100 NICs using the 82557, 82558, and 82559 controllers were a joy to work with on Windows. The NICs performed well and there was some backwards compatibility in the drivers. I have a vague memory of a lockup bug in some Linux driver versions that would knock machines off the network but it was eventually fixed.

I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switches were economical and reliable. It really made no sense for them to be in that market, and they ultimately ditched it, but I liked the simple and inexpensive gear.

The first chassis switch I ever used was the XLNT Millennium that Intel acquired and rebranded as the Intel "6000 Series". At a time when gigabit Ethernet was still exotic getting to play with one in a lab was a treat.

Aside: Videos like this leave me with this "Gee, I could've done that" feeling. It would probably be fun to divest myself of the old junk I have sitting around by way or making videos about the stuff before I liquidate it.

I had some EtherExpress cards, bought new circa 1993. They had a lifetime warranty which Intel honoured sometime around 2005.

Rock-solid drivers - can’t think of a single platform they didn’t run on.

Those Intel cards were the number 1 choice on openbsd back then too.

The bug on Linux still exists today on this family (e100, e1000, e1000e). Maybe the root cause is different, but the solution is still to disable TCP segmentation offload and I suppose this is a firmware bug. At some point, Mellanox took over the "top" card segment for servers.

I've assumed it worked fine on Linux but your comment brought me to this after a quick search: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118721. I've not seen any major issues on Linux e1000e defaults but never pushed it harder than laptop usage. I've occasionally tried to make em(4) TSO work on FreeBSD (it works fine on igb(4)) but gave up due to stalls. Linux has GSO (maybe invented partially due to those issues?) so the benefit is a lot smaller there.

There's a comical change where Intel downclocked DMA to fix some issue and it makes TSO max out at ~700mbps: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... but they later disable TSO there with https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

In this era 3Com was still the gold standard, but intel eventually dominated the market because they integrated 100mbit and then gigabit on the PCH relegating any margin in the expansion card market to servers. As someone that has worked on a lot of Intel drivers I always find Intel being put on a pedestal to be a little amusing, they have a tendency to make a lot of gaffes in silicon and sometimes these reappear in followup designs. It's certainly not bad, but I would place Intel networking about mid-tier historically and today.

Realtek then dominated by being cheaper and simpler than Intel; they had the majority of the NIC marketshare (70%+) in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Most realtek is F tier, they basically repeat the bad part of this NE2000 saga, and the simplicity comes at the cost of CPU cycles. In that sense the Intel PCH controllers were great.

"Good enough for most people and cheap" is what Realtek do.

> I really enjoyed Intel's foray into networking in the late 90s. Their Ethernet hubs and switches were economical and reliable. It really made no sense for them to be in that market, and they ultimately ditched it, but I liked the simple and inexpensive gear.

Intel was always looking for new markets to enter. It's definitely not unreasonable to build NICs and things for NICs to talk to.

They did have someone from Intel on when covering Intel's switches and he brings up his involvement in the Pro/100.

Why did you buy such a card in the 90s? Of course you wanted to play Doom or Duke3D with your buddies!

And to share the broadband cable internet with the neighbors across the street!

Ah, the glory days of finding interrupts, network cards that literally caught on fire, hunting down that one screamer that took down the whole LAN. I don't know why we glorify nostalgia, it was cool at the time but not great. Especially horrible was the Novell 'priesthood' who refused to share any information for fear of giving up power.

I love your video. It bring me so good memories.

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