xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/ae.4 (revision 580744621f33383027108364dcadad718df46ffe)
1.\" Copyright (c) 2008 Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>
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25.\" $FreeBSD$
26.\"
27.Dd May 17, 2019
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 LOADER TUNABLES
99Tunables can be set at the
100.Xr loader 8
101prompt before booting the kernel or stored in
102.Xr loader.conf 5 .
103.Bl -tag -width "xxxxxx"
104.It Va hw.ae.msi_disable
105This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware.
106The default value is 0.
107.El
108.Sh SYSCTL VARIABLES
109The
110.Nm
111driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work.
112The statistics is available via the
113.Va dev.ae.%d.stats
114.Xr sysctl 8
115tree, where %d corresponds to the controller number.
116.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
117.Bl -diag
118.It "ae%d: watchdog timeout."
119The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
120the network connection (cable).
121.It "ae%d: reset timeout."
122The card reset operation has been timed out.
123.It "ae%d: Generating random ethernet address."
124No valid Ethernet address was found in the controller NVRAM and registers.
125Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used
126instead.
127.El
128.Sh SEE ALSO
129.Xr altq 4 ,
130.Xr arp 4 ,
131.Xr miibus 4 ,
132.Xr netintro 4 ,
133.Xr ng_ether 4 ,
134.Xr vlan 4 ,
135.Xr ifconfig 8
136.Sh HISTORY
137The
138.Nm
139driver and this manual page was written by
140.An Stanislav Sedov Aq Mt stas@FreeBSD.org .
141It first appeared in
142.Fx 7.1 .
143.Sh BUGS
144The Attansic L2 FastEthernet controller supports DMA but does not use a
145descriptor based transfer mechanism via scatter-gather DMA.
146Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each
147transmit/receive.
148Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions apply.
149This may introduce a high CPU load on systems with heavy network activity.
150Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern hardware as L2 does
151not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.
152