NAME¶
vge
—
VIA Networking Technologies Velocity Gigabit Ethernet
adapter driver
SYNOPSIS¶
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel
configuration file:
device miibus
device vge
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following
line in
loader.conf(5):
DESCRIPTION¶
The
vge
driver provides support for various
NICs and embedded Ethernet interfaces based on the VIA Technologies VT6120,
VT6122, VT6130 and VT6132 Velocity Family Gigabit Ethernet controller chips.
The VT6120/VT6122 is a 33/66MHz 64-bit PCI device which combines a tri-speed MAC
with an integrated 10/100/1000 copper PHY. (Some older cards use an external
PHY.) The VT6130/VT6132 is the PCI express version of Velocity family. The MAC
supports TCP/IP hardware checksums (IPv4 only), TCP large send, VLAN tag
insertion and stripping, as well as VLAN filtering, a 64-entry CAM filter and
a 64-entry VLAN filter, 64-bit multicast hash filter, 4 separate transmit DMA
queues, flow control and jumbo frames (not on VT6130/VT6132) up to 16K in
size. The Velocity family controllers have a 16K receive FIFO and 48K transmit
FIFO.
The
vge
driver takes advantage of the
controller's checksum offload and VLAN tagging features, as well as the jumbo
frame (except VT6130/VT6132) and CAM filter support. The CAM filter is used
for multicast address filtering to provide 64 perfect multicast address filter
support. If it is necessary for the interface to join more than 64 multicast
groups, the driver will switch over to using the hash filter.
The jumbo frame support can be enabled by setting the interface MTU to any value
larger than the default of 1500 bytes, up to a maximum of 9000 bytes. Jumbo
frames are disabled on the VT6130/VT6132 controllers because the TX MAC will
hang when trying to send a frame that is larger than 4K. The receive and
transmit checksum offload support can be toggled on and off using the
ifconfig(8) utility.
The
vge
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
- Set 10Mbps operation. The ifconfig(8)
mediaopt
option can also be used to
select either full-duplex
or
half-duplex
modes.
100baseTX
- Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. The
ifconfig(8)
mediaopt
option can also be used to
select either full-duplex
or
half-duplex
modes.
1000baseTX
- Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair. The
ifconfig(8)
mediaopt
option can also be used to
select either full-duplex
or
half-duplex
modes.
The
vge
driver supports the following media
options:
full-duplex
- Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex
- Force half duplex operation.
For more information on configuring this device, see
ifconfig(8).
HARDWARE¶
The
vge
driver supports VIA Networking
VT6120, VT6122, VT6130 and VT6132 based Gigabit Ethernet adapters including:
- VIA Networking LAN-on-motherboard Gigabit Ethernet
- ZyXEL GN650-T 64-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1701)
- ZyXEL GN670-T 32-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1702)
LOADER TUNABLES¶
Tunables can be set at the
loader(8) prompt before
booting the kernel or stored in
loader.conf(5).
- hw.vge.msi_disable
- This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. The default
value is 0.
SYSCTL VARIABLES¶
The following variables are available as both
sysctl(8) variables and
loader(8) tunables:
- dev.vge.%d.int_holdoff
- Maximum number of time to delay interrupts. The valid range is 0 to 5100
in units of 1us, the default is 150 (150us). The resolution of timer is
about 20us so finer tuning than 20us wouldn't be available. The interface
should be brought down and up again before a change takes effect.
- dev.vge.%d.rx_coal_pkt
- Maximum number of packets to fire Rx completion interrupt. The valid range
is 1 to 255, the default is 64.
- dev.vge.%d.tx_coal_pkt
- Maximum number of packets to fire Tx completion interrupt. The valid range
is 1 to 255, the default is 128.
DIAGNOSTICS¶
- vge%d: couldn't map memory
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- vge%d: couldn't map ports
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- vge%d: couldn't map interrupt
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- vge%d: failed to enable memory mapping!
- The driver failed to initialize PCI shared memory mapping. This might
happen if the card is not in a bus-master slot.
- vge%d: watchdog timeout
- The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem
with the network connection (cable).
SEE ALSO¶
altq(4),
arp(4),
miibus(4),
netintro(4),
ng_ether(4),
polling(4),
vlan(4),
ifconfig(8)
HISTORY¶
The
vge
device driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 5.3.
AUTHORS¶
The
vge
driver was written by
Bill Paul
⟨wpaul@windriver.com⟩.