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Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

The main problem I have with the PCEngines APU is that it has Realtek 8111/8169 NICs, while the Soekris net6501 has e1000 Intels... Realtek NICs tend, from my experience, to behave erratically under high load on Linux, and sometimes simply not work on FreeBSD and OpenBSD

The full-sized PCIe slot is also a nice touch.

(disclaimer: possible bias, am running a OpenBSD/net6501 as an edge router for a hackerspace)

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I tracked down the r8169 problem to a problem when multiple descriptors are fetched in one IRQ. Kernel 3.12 includes a fix that only fetches one at a time. Have you tried a kernel with that fix in it?

Not yet - I'm really more interested in getting FreeBSD working with it :).

Meh, Soekris was so 2006. Their designs are IMO a bit tacky. And since they use Atom and intel network chipsets, the question needs to be asked... do we trust intel hardware anymore ? I agree intel nics are a bit more reliable.

There is no reason to trust Intel less than any other silicon provider.

I don't agree. The biggest American semiconductor company. Backdoor guaranteed.

So you don't run ANY intel products? That's quite an accomplishment.

That doesn't follow.

Which is why you trust AMD, a company that's headquartered a whopping 600 second drive away from Intel [0]. How is Intel's stuff backdoored, but AMD's stuff not?

[0] http://goo.gl/maps/EB1LA

I never said AMD silicon wasn't backdoored. Its a solid bet that it is. I don't trust either, but having a intel chipset and processor together on a edge router sounds like a bad idea to me.

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