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.
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.
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.
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.