The general trend for laptops seems to be going thin and light at the expense of connectivity (like Ethernet). Would you be interested in a laptop that went the other way and included both a 1000base-T RJ45 and a SFP+ or QSFP+ cage?
No, just lots of USB3 ports. Can do everything else over USB and it's thinner, lighter, safer, & needs fewer drivers.
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USB is safer than Ethernet? It needs kernel drivers etc, and a USB device can pretend to be all kinds of nastiness. Meanwhile, a LAN is a LAN and there's nothing else it can do.
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Yes. Onboard/PCIe ethernet likely has bus-mastering capabilities, integration with ME, boot-from-LAN functionality, etc. USB ethernet is purely a standardized protocol over USB.
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In an ideal world the only real hw driver is the USB host controller, and everything else is just protocols (that could be implemented purely in isolated userspace contexts with no mmio/dma/etc programming).
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"Pretend to be all kinds of nastiness" is a flaw in OS handling of USB devices (automatically assigning a role/privilege to a newly connected device) rather than any inherent problem with USB.
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In that case ME, boot-from-LAN, etc are OS/BIOS/mobo failures rather than inherent problems with Ethernet. And bus mastering is perfectly safe if you have proper memory protection at the physical address level
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For example, in Antikernel the NIC requests a page of RAM directly from the hardware memory allocator for DMA (it has no access to any other RAM), then writes an incoming frame to it and sends a pointer to that page to the host TCP/IP stack for processing.
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Any attempt to access memory not specifically allocated to the NIC results in a bus error. Being a master just means you don't waste CPU time until the frame hits the IP stack (assuming you don't have TCP/IP offload in hardware).
End of conversation
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