xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/ae.4 (revision 2008043f386721d58158e37e0d7e50df8095942d)
1.\" Copyright (c) 2008 Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>
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25.Dd May 17, 2019
26.Dt AE 4
27.Os
28.Sh NAME
29.Nm ae
30.Nd "Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller driver"
31.Sh SYNOPSIS
32To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
33kernel configuration file:
34.Bd -ragged -offset indent
35.Cd "device miibus"
36.Cd "device ae"
37.Ed
38.Pp
39Alternatively, to load the driver as a
40module at boot time, place the following line in
41.Xr loader.conf 5 :
42.Bd -literal -offset indent
43if_ae_load="YES"
44.Ed
45.Sh DESCRIPTION
46The
47.Nm
48device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet
49controllers.
50.Pp
51The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware
52VLAN tag stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism.
53Attansic L2 also features a 64-bit multicast hash filter.
54.Pp
55The
56.Nm
57driver supports the following media types:
58.Bl -tag -width ".Cm 10baseT/UTP"
59.It Cm autoselect
60Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
61The user can manually override the autoselected mode by
62adding media options to
63.Xr rc.conf 5 .
64.It Cm 10baseT/UTP
65Select 10Mbps operation.
66.It Cm 100baseTX
67Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.
68.El
69.Pp
70The
71.Nm
72driver provides support for the following media options:
73.Bl -tag -width ".Cm full-duplex"
74.It Cm full-duplex
75Force full duplex operation.
76.It Cm half-duplex
77Force half duplex operation.
78.El
79.Pp
80For more information on configuring this device, see
81.Xr ifconfig 8 .
82.Sh HARDWARE
83The
84.Nm
85driver supports Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers, and
86is known to support the following hardware:
87.Pp
88.Bl -bullet -compact
89.It
90ASUS EeePC 701
91.It
92ASUS EeePC 900
93.El
94.Pp
95Other hardware may or may not work with this driver.
96.Sh LOADER TUNABLES
97Tunables can be set at the
98.Xr loader 8
99prompt before booting the kernel or stored in
100.Xr loader.conf 5 .
101.Bl -tag -width "xxxxxx"
102.It Va hw.ae.msi_disable
103This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware.
104The default value is 0.
105.El
106.Sh SYSCTL VARIABLES
107The
108.Nm
109driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work.
110The statistics is available via the
111.Va dev.ae.%d.stats
112.Xr sysctl 8
113tree, where %d corresponds to the controller number.
114.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
115.Bl -diag
116.It "ae%d: watchdog timeout."
117The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
118the network connection (cable).
119.It "ae%d: reset timeout."
120The card reset operation has been timed out.
121.It "ae%d: Generating random ethernet address."
122No valid Ethernet address was found in the controller NVRAM and registers.
123Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used
124instead.
125.El
126.Sh SEE ALSO
127.Xr altq 4 ,
128.Xr arp 4 ,
129.Xr miibus 4 ,
130.Xr netintro 4 ,
131.Xr ng_ether 4 ,
132.Xr vlan 4 ,
133.Xr ifconfig 8
134.Sh HISTORY
135The
136.Nm
137driver and this manual page was written by
138.An Stanislav Sedov Aq Mt stas@FreeBSD.org .
139It first appeared in
140.Fx 7.1 .
141.Sh BUGS
142The Attansic L2 FastEthernet controller supports DMA but does not use a
143descriptor based transfer mechanism via scatter-gather DMA.
144Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each
145transmit/receive.
146Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions apply.
147This may introduce a high CPU load on systems with heavy network activity.
148Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern hardware as L2 does
149not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.
150