man/man4/vr.4

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.Dd February 25, 2012
.Dt VR 4
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm vr
.Nd "VIA Technologies Rhine I/II/III Ethernet device driver"
.Sh SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel,
place the following lines in your
kernel configuration file:
.Bd -ragged -offset indent
.Cd "device miibus"
.Cd "device vr"
.Ed
.Pp
Alternatively, to load the driver as a
module at boot time, place the following line in
.Xr loader.conf 5 :
.Bd -literal -offset indent
if_vr_load="YES"
.Ed
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
controllers based on the VIA Technologies VT3043 Rhine I,
VT86C100A Rhine II, and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet
controller chips.
.Pp
The VIA Rhine chips use bus master DMA and have a descriptor layout
designed to resemble that of the DEC 21x4x
.Dq tulip
chips.
The register
layout is different however and the receive filter in the Rhine chips
is much simpler and is programmed through registers rather than by
downloading a special setup frame through the transmit DMA engine.
Transmit and receive DMA buffers must be longword
aligned.
The Rhine chips are meant to be interfaced with external
physical layer devices via an MII bus.
They support both
10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
.Pp
The
.Nm
driver supports the following media types:
.Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.It autoselect
Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
The user can manually override
the autoselected mode by adding media options to the
.Pa /etc/rc.conf
file.
.It 10baseT/UTP
Set 10Mbps operation.
The
.Ar mediaopt
option can also be used to select either
.Ar full-duplex
or
.Ar half-duplex
modes.
.It 100baseTX
Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
The
.Ar mediaopt
option can also be used to select either
.Ar full-duplex
or
.Ar half-duplex
modes.
.El
.Pp
The
.Nm
driver supports the following media options:
.Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.It full-duplex
Force full duplex operation.
.It half-duplex
Force half duplex operation.
.El
.Pp
Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported
by the adapter.
For more information on configuring this device, see
.Xr ifconfig 8 .
.Sh HARDWARE
The
.Nm
driver supports VIA Technologies Rhine I, Rhine II, and Rhine III based
Fast Ethernet adapters including:
.Pp
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
AOpen/Acer ALN-320
.It
D-Link DFE520-TX
.It
D-Link DFE530-TX
.It
Hawking Technologies PN102TX
.It
Soekris Engineering net5501
.El
.Sh SYSCTL VARIABLES
The following variables are available as
.Xr sysctl 8
variables:
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Va dev.vr.%d.stats
Display lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver.
.El
.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
.Bl -diag
.It "vr%d: couldn't map memory"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
.It "vr%d: couldn't map interrupt"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
.It "vr%d: watchdog timeout"
The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
the network connection (cable).
.It "vr%d: no memory for rx list"
The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
.It "vr%d: no memory for tx list"
The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the transmitter ring when
allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf chain into a cluster.
.It "vr%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0"
This message applies only to adapters which support power
management.
Some operating systems place the controller in low power
mode when shutting down, and some PCI BIOSes fail to bring the chip
out of this state before configuring it.
The controller loses all of
its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if the BIOS does not set
it back to full power mode in time, it will not be able to configure it
correctly.
The driver tries to detect this condition and bring
the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this may not be
enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.
If
you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach
the device as a network interface, you will have to perform second
warm boot to have the device properly configured.
.Pp
Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another
operating system.
If you power down your system prior to booting
.Fx ,
the card should be configured correctly.
.El
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr altq 4 ,
.Xr arp 4 ,
.Xr miibus 4 ,
.Xr netintro 4 ,
.Xr ng_ether 4 ,
.Xr polling 4 ,
.Xr ifconfig 8
.Rs
.%T The VIA Technologies VT86C100A data sheet
.%U http://www.via.com.tw
.Re
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
device driver first appeared in
.Fx 3.0 .
.Sh AUTHORS
The
.Nm
driver was written by
.An Bill Paul Aq Mt wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu .
.Sh BUGS
The
.Nm
driver always copies transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify the Rhine chips.
If buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the
supplied buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location.
This buffer copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but cannot
be avoided.
On faster machines (e.g.\& a Pentium II), the performance
impact is much less noticeable.