I'll have to recheck but I'm pretty sure I did significantly better than 25Mbit with the 3C597. IIRC I was getting in the low 40s on NT4

This project - https://github.com/jfabienke/3com-packet-driver - claims much better throughput for the 3C515.
But not tested on real hardware - oh well, I'm waiting for the release...

Grzyb wrote on 2025-11-02, 16:34:

This project - https://github.com/jfabienke/3com-packet-driver - claims much better throughput for the 3C515.
But not tested on real hardware - oh well, I'm waiting for the release...

Didn't we discuss that project here: Re: DOS packet drivers for 3COM 3C515-TX?

Not sure it is buildable in its current form - there seemed to be quite a few long filenames in the source unsupported in DOS, when someone tried to build it the makefile generated a load of errors - plus it referred to includes which don't exist in the Git repo.
Without any evidence, I don't know if it's actually real or has been built - or how big it actually is; there's an enormous amount of source (assembly and C) included - considering the tiny size of most existing packet drivers. But there's no logs or screengrabs to show it running, unfortunately.

The documentation seems to refer to the driver as both '3CPKT.EXE', '3CPD.COM' or '3CPD.EXE' depending on which section you read. The supported command line arguments also seem to change from section to section.

I don't want to say that this is all completely AI generated, but chunks of the docs read as though they have been produced by an LLM.

If someone is able to build it, and it works as described then I'll eat humble pie... but the first step is someone actually building it.

I think we can see that a lot of the content of that driver repo is being AI generated:

https://github.com/jfabienke/3com-packet-driv … /code-frequency

https://github.com/jfabienke/3com-packet-driv … hs/contributors

Claude (https://claude.com/product/claude-code) made 224K additions and 155K deletions after the initial commit. The amount of AI generated content would make me extremely wary.

Indeed - I'm also afraid that project looks too beautiful to be true.
But I want to be wrong...

Doesn't build, even on Linux with long filenames - the Makefile is broken:

1$ /opt/toolchains/x86/watcom/binl/wmake release
2Open Watcom Make Version 2.0 beta Mar  1 2025 02:31:41 (32-bit)
3Copyright (c) 2002-2025 The Open Watcom Contributors. All Rights Reserved.
4Portions Copyright (c) 1988-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
5Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
6See https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2#readme for details.
7Makefile(203): Error(E24): More than one command list found for (PRODUCTION)
8Makefile(210): Error(E21): Extension(s) (.PHONY) not defined
9Makefile(210): Error(E09): Ignoring out of place Path Specifier
10Makefile(210): Warning(W79): Makefile may be Microsoft; try /ms switch
11...
12...
13Makefile(270): Warning(W18): Unrecognized or out of place character '='
14...
15...
16Makefile(272): Warning(W18): Unrecognized or out of place character ','
17...
18...
19Makefile(272): Warning(W18): Unrecognized or out of place character '='
20...
21...
22Makefile(309): Warning(W18): Unrecognized or out of place character '|'
23Makefile(399): Error(E24): More than one command list found for (build/%.obj)
24...
25...
26Makefile(526): Warning(W18): Unrecognized or out of place character '|'
27Makefile(590): Error(E24): More than one command list found for (verify-patches)
28Error(E02): Make execution terminated

I cut out the repeating errors. But the Makefile clearly isn't formatted to work with wmake from Open Watcom.

Unless by "Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 or later" it actually means "only builds with Open Watcom 1.9+ and < 2.0". I'll try installing an older non-2.0 version of Open Watcom, as I'm aware of the large codebase change between them - but I have my doubts.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2025-11-02, 15:29:

I'll have to recheck but I'm pretty sure I did significantly better than 25Mbit with the 3C597. IIRC I was getting in the low 40s on NT4

Do you remember which system you had?
I have used a 486DX at 50 MHz.
256 kB L2 cache
32 MB RAM
Adaptec 2740W SCSI controller
EISA bus at 8.33 MHz.

Grzyb wrote on 2025-11-02, 12:57:

This card is "100 Mbps Signaling Rate" - but only 15 Mbps throughput 🤣

Yes, that also came to my mind.

mkarcher wrote on 2025-10-22, 19:34:

Some data point from my Am386DX-40 system, with an Adaptec 1542CF running at an ISA DMA transfer rate of 8MB/s. The hard drive in that system is a Fireball 1080S, which is not necessarily known for its superior speed.

I have a very similar thing - only my drive is IBM DCHS09F.

ASPI4DOS.SYS loaded, "Int 13H routed through ASPI manager."
FAST SCSI enabled for all devices - but there's practically no difference compared to FAST SCSI disabled!
DMA Transfer Rate = 5.0 MB/s (default)

DMA Transfer Rate = 5.7 MB/s

DMA Transfer Rate = 6.7 MB/s already causes DOS to hang on boot

I guess 1863 KB/s in FTP isn't that bad, after all.
For notably more, I would need that elusive super-DMA, and a NIC with the option to make use of it.

I'm almost ready to accept that the max for normal ISA is 2+ MB/s, but I still have doubts...
What's the meaning of the "3.3 MB/s" in IDE PIO Mode 0 ?
And note that my ISA video memory scores almost 4 MB/s !

Perhaps instead of struggling with bus mastering, they should have placed the NIC's buffer in the memory address space?