ORBIT-USER: Questions about MAC cards ...

[Mesut Ali Ergin]

Assuming you are referring to wired/wireless NICs,

1. They do have multiple frame holding buffers. (e.g. ORBIT Atheros 5212 
cards have a 50-frame buffer)

2. They behave exactly the way an interrupt driven device should behave. 
You can give it as many as 50 packets as fast as you can, it will let 
you know what happened to those packets (individually or in bunches) by 
generating interrupts and calling registered ISR of the driver.

--
MAE


Brian K. Russell wrote:
> 1. Do MAC cards have buffers for multiple outgoing packets or is there
> room for just one packet at a time?
> 
> 2. If a MAC card is busy with an outgoing packet (unicast or broadcast),
> what happens if another outgoing packet is given to the MAC card before
> it's finished with the its current outgoing packet?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> BKR
>