Hugh, I think I mostly prefer to stick to Intel drivers for what now is considered legacy reasons, right now I'm working on a computer that's got RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet and it's works just fine. But five to ten years ago I remember Linux and OpenBSD developers going on a rant about how bad and unpredictable Realtek gigabit chips were, whereas Intel were paying people to work on e1000 drivers in the kernel. I still have dual e1000 PCI cards laying around sever that I can pop in a computer at any moment and know that they would work. When it comes to wireless, I still remember the pain of trying to configure rtl 81xx or even worse, set up ndiswrapper for broadcom chip. After that I started buying laptops that have Intel wireless chips in them and suddenly I stopped needing to think about configuring wifi. I guess when I see a network card that isn't based on intel, I shrug and think to myself -- "oh, it's gonna stop working in the next kernel upgrade". Alex. On 2018-02-28 01:25 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| Looking at their drivers, the ones I checked were all intel wifi and | realtek gigabit.
My zboxes use Realtek gigabit ethernet.
I know that those in the know prefer Intel but I'm not up to speed on why.
I'll give you a why not: Intel ethernet seems to collude with Intel Management Engine to provide "lights out management". This works without involving the main processor and thus without involving your system's own firewall. In other words, you have a big gaping security hole that is very hard to plug (or even assess).
Many years ago, DEC Tulip ethernet chips were considered a Good Thing. I think that Realtek's ethernet chips are descendants. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk