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 ...
Get Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
