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AE(4) | Device Drivers Manual | AE(4) |
NAME¶
ae
—
Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller
driver
SYNOPSIS¶
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:device miibus
device ae
if_ae_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION¶
Theae
device driver provides support for
Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers.
The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware VLAN tag
stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism. Attansic L2 also
features a 64-bit multicast hash filter.
The ae
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 rc.conf(5).
10baseT/UTP
- Select 10Mbps operation.
100baseTX
- Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.
ae
driver provides support for the
following media options:
full-duplex
- Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex
- Force half duplex operation.
HARDWARE¶
Theae
driver supports Attansic/Atheros L2
PCIe FastEthernet controllers, and is known to support the following hardware:
- ASUS EeePC 701
- ASUS EeePC 900
LOADER TUNABLES¶
Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).- hw.ae.msi_disable
- This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. The default value is 0.
SYSCTL VARIABLES¶
Theae
driver collects a number of useful MAC
counter during the work. The statistics is available via the
dev.ae.%d.stats
sysctl(8) tree, where %d corresponds to the
controller number.
DIAGNOSTICS¶
- ae%d: watchdog timeout.
- The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
- ae%d: reset timeout.
- The card reset operation has been timed out.
- ae%d: Generating random ethernet address.
- No valid Ethernet address was found in the controller NVRAM and registers. Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used instead.
SEE ALSO¶
altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)HISTORY¶
Theae
driver and this manual page was
written by Stanislav Sedov
⟨stas@FreeBSD.org⟩. It first appeared in
FreeBSD 7.1.
BUGS¶
The Attansic L2 FastEthernet controller supports DMA but does not use a descriptor based transfer mechanism via scatter-gather DMA. Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each transmit/receive. Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions apply. This may introduce a high CPU load on systems with heavy network activity. Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern hardware as L2 does not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.October 4, 2008 | Debian |