What's the story on MAC-level flow control?
The only Linux drivers I can find which do this are Donald's latest
eepro100 and 3com's 3c90x. starfire seems to have infrastructure but
never turns it on.
Is this considered a useful thing to have?
This abstract:
http://www.computer.org/proceedings/lcn/0309/03090160abs.htm makes it
sound bad.
This article: http://www.nwfusion.com/netresources/0913flow.html and the
vendor opinions at http://www.nwfusion.com/netresources/0913flow2.html
show mixed opinions.
I would have thought that if a switch is doing 10<->100 conversion then
it would be a good thing to have for non-TCP protocols (eg, streaming
media across the LAN, NFS).
I've altered one of Donald's tools so it produces 802.3x PAUSE frames
and I've got it all working in 3c59x (as a module option). Should I
have bothered?
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