April 1998
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
16h 11m
English
book
Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition
by Adrian Cockcroft, Richard Pettit
Content preview from Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition
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Network Interface Types
There are many interface types in use on Sun systems. In this section, I discuss some of their distinguishing features.
10-Mbit SBus Interfaces — “le” and “qe”
The “le” interface is used on many SPARC desktop machines. The built-in Ethernet interface shares its direct memory access (DMA) connection to the SBus with the SCSI interface but has higher priority, so heavy Ethernet activity can reduce disk throughput. This can be a problem with the original DMA controller used in the SPARCstation 1, 1+, SLC, and IPC, but subsequent machines have enough DMA bandwidth to support both.
The add-on SBus Ethernet card uses exactly the same interface as the built-in Ethernet but has an SBus DMA controller to itself. The more recent ...