NAME¶
vx
—
3Com EtherLink III / Fast EtherLink III (3c59x)
Ethernet driver
SYNOPSIS¶
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel
configuration file:
device vx
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following
line in
loader.conf(5):
DESCRIPTION¶
The
vx
driver provides support for the 3Com
“Vortex” chipset.
The medium selection can be influenced by the following link flags to the
ifconfig(8) command:
- link0
- Use the AUI port.
- link1
- Use the BNC port.
- link2
- Use the UTP port.
HARDWARE¶
The
vx
driver supports the following cards:
- 3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
- 3Com 3c592 EtherLink III EISA
- 3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode
- 3Com 3c597 Fast EtherLink III EISA in 10 Mbps mode
DIAGNOSTICS¶
- vx%d: not configured; kernel is built for only %d devices.
- There are not enough devices in the kernel configuration file for the
number of adapters present in the system. Add devices to the configuration
file, rebuild the kernel, and reboot.
All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the driver.
SEE ALSO¶
arp(4),
netintro(4),
ng_ether(4),
ifconfig(8)
HISTORY¶
The
vx
device driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 2.1. It was derived from the
ep
driver, from which it inherits most of
its limitations.
AUTHORS¶
The
vx
device driver and this manual page
were written by
Fred Gray
⟨fgray@rice.edu⟩, based on the work of
Herb Peyerl and with the assistance of
numerous others.
CAVEATS¶
Some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many receive
overruns, which cause lost packets. The author has attempted to implement a
test for it based on the information supplied by 3Com, but the test resulted
mostly in spurious warnings.
The performance of this driver is somewhat limited by the fact that it uses only
polled-mode I/O and does not make use of the bus-mastering capability of the
cards.
BUGS¶
The
vx
driver is known not to reset the
adapter correctly following a warm boot on some systems.
The
vx
driver has not been exhaustively
tested with all the models of cards that it claims to support.