xref: /dragonfly/share/man/man4/ae.4 (revision d4ef6694)
1.\" Copyright (c) 2008 Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>
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25.\" $FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/ae.4,v 1.2.2.1.4.1 2009/04/15 03:14:26 kensmith Exp $
26.\"
27.Dd July 13, 2009
28.Dt AE 4
29.Os
30.Sh NAME
31.Nm ae
32.Nd "Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller driver"
33.Sh SYNOPSIS
34To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
35kernel configuration file:
36.Bd -ragged -offset indent
37.Cd "device miibus"
38.Cd "device ae"
39.Ed
40.Pp
41Alternatively, to load the driver as a
42module at boot time, place the following line in
43.Xr loader.conf 5 :
44.Bd -literal -offset indent
45if_ae_load="YES"
46.Ed
47.Sh DESCRIPTION
48The
49.Nm
50device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet
51controllers.
52.Pp
53The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware
54VLAN tag stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism.
55Attansic L2 also features a 64-bit multicast hash filter.
56.Pp
57The
58.Nm
59driver supports the following media types:
60.Bl -tag -width ".Cm 10baseT/UTP"
61.It Cm autoselect
62Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
63The user can manually override the autoselected mode by
64adding media options to
65.Xr rc.conf 5 .
66.It Cm 10baseT/UTP
67Select 10Mbps operation.
68.It Cm 100baseTX
69Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.
70.El
71.Pp
72The
73.Nm
74driver provides support for the following media options:
75.Bl -tag -width ".Cm full-duplex"
76.It Cm full-duplex
77Force full duplex operation.
78.It Cm half-duplex
79Force half duplex operation.
80.El
81.Pp
82For more information on configuring this device, see
83.Xr ifconfig 8 .
84.Sh HARDWARE
85The
86.Nm
87driver supports Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers, and
88is known to support the following hardware:
89.Pp
90.Bl -bullet -compact
91.It
92ASUS EeePC 701
93.It
94ASUS EeePC 900
95.El
96.Pp
97Other hardware may or may not work with this driver.
98.Sh SYSCTL VARIABLES
99The
100.Nm
101driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work.
102The statistics is available via the
103.Va hw.ae%d.stats
104.Xr sysctl 8
105tree, where %d corresponds to the controller number.
106.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
107.Bl -diag
108.It "ae%d: watchdog timeout."
109The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
110the network connection (cable).
111.It "ae%d: reset timeout."
112The card reset operation has been timed out.
113.It "ae%d: Generating random ethernet address."
114No valid ethernet address was found neither in the controller registers not in
115NVRAM.
116Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used
117instead.
118.El
119.Sh SEE ALSO
120.Xr arp 4 ,
121.Xr ifmedia 4 ,
122.Xr miibus 4 ,
123.Xr netintro 4 ,
124.Xr ng_ether 4 ,
125.Xr vlan 4 ,
126.Xr ifconfig 8
127.Sh HISTORY
128The
129.Nm
130driver and this manual page were written by
131.An Stanislav Sedov Aq Mt stas@FreeBSD.org .
132It first appeared in
133.Fx 7.1 .
134.Sh BUGS
135The Attansic L2 FastEthernet contoller supports DMA but do not use a descriptor
136based transfer mechanism via scatter-gather DMA.
137Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each
138transmit/receive.
139Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions apply.
140This may introduce a high CPU load on systems with heavy network activity.
141Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern hardware as L2 does
142not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.
143