NAME¶
vr
—
VIA Technologies Rhine I/II/III Ethernet device
driver
SYNOPSIS¶
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel
configuration file:
device miibus
device vr
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following
line in
loader.conf(5):
DESCRIPTION¶
The
vr
driver provides support for PCI
Ethernet adapters and embedded controllers based on the VIA Technologies
VT3043 Rhine I, VT86C100A Rhine II, and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet
controller chips.
The VIA Rhine chips use bus master DMA and have a descriptor layout designed to
resemble that of the DEC 21x4x “tulip” chips. The register
layout is different however and the receive filter in the Rhine chips is much
simpler and is programmed through registers rather than by downloading a
special setup frame through the transmit DMA engine. Transmit and receive DMA
buffers must be longword aligned. The Rhine chips are meant to be interfaced
with external physical layer devices via an MII bus. They support both 10 and
100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
The
vr
driver supports the following media
types:
- autoselect
- Enable autoselection of the media type and options. The user can manually
override the autoselected mode by adding media options to the
/etc/rc.conf file.
- 10baseT/UTP
- Set 10Mbps operation. The mediaopt option
can also be used to select either
full-duplex or
half-duplex modes.
- 100baseTX
- Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. The
mediaopt option can also be used to
select either full-duplex or
half-duplex modes.
The
vr
driver supports the following media
options:
- full-duplex
- Force full duplex operation.
- half-duplex
- Force half duplex operation.
Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported by the
adapter. For more information on configuring this device, see
ifconfig(8).
HARDWARE¶
The
vr
driver supports VIA Technologies Rhine
I, Rhine II, and Rhine III based Fast Ethernet adapters including:
- AOpen/Acer ALN-320
- D-Link DFE520-TX
- D-Link DFE530-TX
- Hawking Technologies PN102TX
- Soekris Engineering net5501
SYSCTL VARIABLES¶
The following variables are available as
sysctl(8)
variables:
- dev.vr.%d.stats
- Display lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver.
DIAGNOSTICS¶
- vr%d: couldn't map memory
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- vr%d: couldn't map interrupt
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- vr%d: watchdog timeout
- The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem
with the network connection (cable).
- vr%d: no memory for rx list
- The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
- vr%d: no memory for tx list
- The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the transmitter ring when
allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf chain into a cluster.
- vr%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0
- This message applies only to adapters which support power management. Some
operating systems place the controller in low power mode when shutting
down, and some PCI BIOSes fail to bring the chip out of this state before
configuring it. The controller loses all of its PCI configuration in the
D3 state, so if the BIOS does not set it back to full power mode in time,
it will not be able to configure it correctly. The driver tries to detect
this condition and bring the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state,
but this may not be enough to return the driver to a fully operational
condition. If you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to
attach the device as a network interface, you will have to perform second
warm boot to have the device properly configured.
Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another
operating system. If you power down your system prior to booting
FreeBSD, the card should be configured
correctly.
SEE ALSO¶
altq(4),
arp(4),
miibus(4),
netintro(4),
ng_ether(4),
polling(4),
ifconfig(8)
The VIA Technologies VT86C100A
data sheet,
http://www.via.com.tw.
HISTORY¶
The
vr
device driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 3.0.
AUTHORS¶
The
vr
driver was written by
Bill Paul
⟨wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu⟩.
BUGS¶
The
vr
driver always copies transmit mbuf
chains into longword-aligned buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify
the Rhine chips. If buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the
supplied buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location. This buffer
copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but cannot be avoided.
On faster machines (e.g. a Pentium II), the performance impact is much less
noticeable.