[JoeAltmaier]

Is it truly hardware? I had to deal with radios for years, and the vendor-supplied driver was always poor. It came from some SOM company, who got it from the radio designer. It was always a demo driver, intended to show off the chip features but no effort put into performance or error recovery.

It seemed nobody in the 'chain of custody' of a driver had any incentive to make it work well, in a commercial setting. At best, it was consumer-quality. By that I mean, it worked until it didn't. For a radio, it meant if roaming jammed up then just take the radio dongle out and put it in again. Which in a commercial device (like a forklift touchpad) which had the radio sealed behind a panel, it was junk.

So I had to fix features, performance, bugs, timing, power management, the works. E.g. to get a radio driver fit for a WalMart distribution center forklift going 15mph, it had to roam in milliseconds and choose between 60 APs in radio range. And run for a 12 hour shift without recharging. The chipmaker driver was never, ever good enough.

[kev009]

Dollar for dollar, the Chelsio and Mellanox HW is better in terms of features. Better drivers and vendor support at lower purchase price make it a no brainer. I don't know about SolarFlare pricing but it is also better HW.

igb and ixgbe HW seem to be fair, but you can go look at the HW errata to judge for yourself. Intel had to recall the XL710 due to silicon issues. They also had a firmware incident that fundamentally changes the driver interface, so a particular driver will not work between different FW revs.