List of NICs that are known to be flashable with iPXE

[dominikr]

I was directed from the IRC chan to this thread... so here's what I have to say about NICs:

I only know of two brands which have software flashable ROM, Broadcom and Intel
And... do not use Broadcom, or you will suffer. A lot.
See e.g. http://blog.serverfault.com/post/broadcom-die-mutha/
The fileserver at the company I currently work had severe problems with Broadcom NICs.
I also had big problems with a Broadcom NIC dropping anything else than TCP like wild. ATA over Ethernet server had only 500kb/sec with a Broadcom chip. Then I switched to an Intel card, and voilà, 60mb/sec (the one from serverfault was in a win environment, my two examples are from a linux environment).
So yes, buy Intel.
Isn't the one you mentioned a rather pricey PCI-X card? Last one I bought was a Intel PWLA8391GTBLK Pro 1000GT, but I have to admit I didn't try to flash this one, because it went into my PXE server
But in general, Intel NICs are very well supported, so you shouldn't have any problems flashing them (you can download the DOS tool from the Intel website).
And yes, I'm a big fan of Intel NICs. Want to have (working) VLAN support? Working TCP checksum offloading? Best performance available? WoL? Low interrupt load? A network card that just works and doesn't give you headaches? Intel!