[Pc_Support] Realtek 8169 -- sound typical for CIFS/SMB on RTL81x9 series at 100Mbps

[Bryan J. Smith]

tonyb wrote:
> Is anyone using these successfully between Linux and XP?

I've avoided the RTL8169 in general.  Although there are options to
provide it 8KiB TX + 64KiB RX SRAM, most of the on-board ones I've
seen only offer 2KiB TX + 2KiB RX on ASIC/MAC.  I believe it is not
capable of 9000 byte Jumbo frames in _any_ configuration.

At Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), don't expect much beyond 240Mbps (30MBps) actual.

> I have two with a cross-wired cat6 cable.

Cross-wired how?  Understand that 1000Base-T is 4-pair (8-conductor)
and does _not_ work with standard 568A/B cross-over wiring.  The 4, 5,
7 and 8 conductors must be crossed as well.  If they are not, then you
get 100Mbps Fast Ethernet (FE), _not_ 1000Mbps GbE.

A good page on this is here:
  http://logout.sh/computers/net/gigabit/

AutoMDI-X GbE NICs are _uncommon_.  I.e., they won't use
straight-through cables.

> When I'm running Linux on both boxes I get 10+MB throughput.

Which is typically for 100Mbps FE.

> Linux on one and XP on the other and throughput is less than 2MB.

What protocol?

Microsoft CIFS/SMB is TCP and has a massive amount of overhead.  I
typically can't break 3-4MBps over 100Mbps Fast Ethernet.

On those crappy RTL8169, 2MBps doesn't sound out-of-the-ordinary.

> I know...I know... Get rid of XP.  Just as soon as I solve the video capture
> problem from the previous post.

Most people have been going with the Happauge WinTV-PVR-150, 250 or
350 products that start at sub-$100 with _hardware_ MPEG-2 capture
supported with the ivtv driver.  A few versions of the units are not
ivtv compatible -- e.g., some of the select Media Center Editions
(MCE) -- so check the _exact_ model number before you buy.