[eek04_]

Back in the 1990s, I was a FreeBSD guy, and at some point I looked over the code for a few of the popular Linux ISA networking drivers for some reason and was shocked at the low quality. The code quality of the core Linux kernel is generally excellent - the code quality of these drivers was at the level of "lowest passing undergraduate's second C program". I'd not be at all surprised if this turned out bugs giving bad performance; drivers are often considered finished when they produce the expected result, and network protocols have enough recovery mechanisms that you can get the expected result with a fair number of bugs.

The NE2000 clones worked fairly well in FreeBSD at the same time all the complaints were coming over in Linux-land. To be fair: You'd usually have less support for hardware in FreeBSD than Linux at the time (and almost certainly still.)

[bsder]

It also didn't help that these cards often had weird hardware failures (maybe because clone?) that would make them flaky but people would keep them in service because Ethernet cards were still relatively expensive at the time and, as you point out, network protocols are pretty resilient.

I used to have to literally break flaky cards in half--not kidding. Three different people fished a card out of my trash and only stopped when they realized I physically broke it--and this was about 2001-ish.