xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/rl.4 (revision e0c27215058b5786c78fcfb3963eebe61a989511)
1.\" Copyright (c) 1997, 1998
2.\"	Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>. All rights reserved.
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31.\" $FreeBSD$
32.\"
33.Dd November 4, 1998
34.Dt RL 4
35.Os
36.Sh NAME
37.Nm rl
38.Nd RealTek 8129/8139/8139C+ fast ethernet device driver
39.Sh SYNOPSIS
40.Cd "device miibus"
41.Cd "device rl"
42.Sh DESCRIPTION
43The
44.Nm
45driver provides support for PCI ethernet adapters and embedded
46controllers based on the RealTek 8129 and 8139 fast ethernet controller
47chips, including the following:
48.Pp
49.Bl -bullet -compact -offset indent
50.It
51Allied Telesyn AT2550
52.It
53Farallon NetLINE 10/100 PCI
54.It
55Genius GF100TXR,
56.It
57NDC Communications NE100TX-E
58.It
59OvisLink LEF-8129TX
60.It
61OvisLink LEF-8139TX,
62.It
63Netronix Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100
64.It
65KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet,
66.It
67Encore ENL832-TX 10/100 M PCI,
68.It
69Longshine LCS-8038TX-R
70.It
71SMC EZ Card 10/100 PCI 1211-TX
72.It
73Compaq HNE-300
74.It
75LevelOne FPC-0106TX
76.It
77Edimax EP-4103DL CardBus
78.It
79Nortel Networks 10/100BaseTX
80.It
81D-Link DFE-690TXD
82.It
83D-Link DFE-530TX+
84.It
85D-Link DFE-538TX (same as 530+?)
86.It
87Corega FEther CB-TXD
88.It
89Corega FEtherII CB-TXD
90.It
91Peppercon AG ROL-F
92.It
93Planex FNW-3800-TX
94.It
95Accton EN1207D
96.It
97GigaFast Ethernet EE100-AXP
98.It
99CompUSA no-name 10/100 PCI ethernet NIC
100.It
101Belkin F5D5000
102.El
103.Pp
104The RealTek 8129/8139 series controllers use bus master DMA but do not use a
105descriptor-based data transfer mechanism.
106The receiver uses a
107single fixed size ring buffer from which packets must be copied
108into mbufs.
109For transmission, there are only four outbound packet
110address registers which require all outgoing packets to be stored
111as contiguous buffers.
112Furthermore, outbound packet buffers must
113be longword aligned or else transmission will fail.
114.Pp
115The 8129 differs from the 8139 in that the 8139 has an internal
116PHY which is controlled through special direct access registers
117whereas the 8129 uses an external PHY via an MII bus.
118The 8139
119supports both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
120The 8129 can support the same speeds and modes given an appropriate
121PHY chip.
122.Pp
123Support is also provided for the special C+ mode of the 8139C+ chip.
124By default, the 8139C+ is back backwards compatible with the 8139, but
125in C+ mode it supports advanced features such as descriptor-based DMA,
12664-bit addressing, TCP/IP checksum offload on both receive and transmit,
127hardware VLAN tag insertion and extraction, and TCP large send.
128When used with an 8139C+ chip, the
129.Nm
130driver makes use of all of these features, except for TCP large send,
131since there is currently no OS support for it. Transmit interrupt
132moderation is also used to improve performance at high frame rates.
133The receive and transmit checksum offload capabilities are on by default
134but can be toggled off using the
135.Xr ifconfig 8
136command.
137.Pp
138The
139.Nm
140driver supports the following media types:
141.Pp
142.Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
143.It autoselect
144Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
145This is only
146supported if the PHY chip attached to the RealTek controller
147supports NWAY autonegotiation.
148The user can manually override
149the autoselected mode by adding media options to the
150.Pa /etc/rc.conf
151file.
152.It 10baseT/UTP
153Set 10Mbps operation.
154The
155.Ar mediaopt
156option can also be used to select either
157.Ar full-duplex
158or
159.Ar half-duplex
160modes.
161.It 100baseTX
162Set 100Mbps (fast ethernet) operation.
163The
164.Ar mediaopt
165option can also be used to select either
166.Ar full-duplex
167or
168.Ar half-duplex
169modes.
170.El
171.Pp
172The
173.Nm
174driver supports the following media options:
175.Pp
176.Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
177.It full-duplex
178Force full duplex operation
179.It half-duplex
180Force half duplex operation.
181.El
182.Pp
183Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported
184by the adapter.
185For more information on configuring this device, see
186.Xr ifconfig 8 .
187.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
188.Bl -diag
189.It "rl%d: couldn't map memory"
190A fatal initialization error has occurred.
191.It "rl%d: couldn't map interrupt"
192A fatal initialization error has occurred.
193.It "rl%d: watchdog timeout"
194The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
195the network connection (cable).
196.It "rl%d: no memory for rx list"
197The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
198.It "rl%d: no memory for tx list"
199The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the transmitter ring when
200allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf chain into a cluster.
201.It "rl%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0"
202This message applies only to adapters which support power
203management.
204Some operating systems place the controller in low power
205mode when shutting down, and some PCI BIOSes fail to bring the chip
206out of this state before configuring it.
207The controller loses all of
208its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if the BIOS does not set
209it back to full power mode in time, it won't be able to configure it
210correctly.
211The driver tries to detect this condition and bring
212the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this may not be
213enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.
214If
215you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach
216the device as a network interface, you will have to perform second
217warm boot to have the device properly configured.
218.Pp
219Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another
220operating system.
221If you power down your system prior to booting
222.Fx ,
223the card should be configured correctly.
224.El
225.Sh SEE ALSO
226.Xr arp 4 ,
227.Xr miibus 4 ,
228.Xr netintro 4 ,
229.Xr ng_ether 4 ,
230.Xr ifconfig 8
231.Rs
232.%B The RealTek 8129, 8139 and 8139C+ datasheets
233.%O http://www.realtek.com.tw
234.Re
235.Sh HISTORY
236The
237.Nm
238device driver first appeared in
239.Fx 3.0 .
240.Sh AUTHORS
241The
242.Nm
243driver was written by
244.An Bill Paul Aq wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu .
245.Sh BUGS
246Since outbound packets must be longword aligned, the transmit
247routine has to copy an unaligned packet into an mbuf cluster buffer
248before transmission.
249The driver abuses the fact that the cluster buffer
250pool is allocated at system startup time in a contiguous region starting
251at a page boundary.
252Since cluster buffers are 2048 bytes, they are
253longword aligned by definition.
254The driver probably should not be
255depending on this characteristic.
256.Pp
257The RealTek data sheets are of especially poor quality,
258and there is a lot of information missing
259particularly concerning the receiver operation.
260One particularly
261important fact that the data sheets fail to mention relates to the
262way in which the chip fills in the receive buffer.
263When an interrupt
264is posted to signal that a frame has been received, it is possible that
265another frame might be in the process of being copied into the receive
266buffer while the driver is busy handling the first one.
267If the driver
268manages to finish processing the first frame before the chip is done
269DMAing the rest of the next frame, the driver may attempt to process
270the next frame in the buffer before the chip has had a chance to finish
271DMAing all of it.
272.Pp
273The driver can check for an incomplete frame by inspecting the frame
274length in the header preceding the actual packet data: an incomplete
275frame will have the magic length of 0xFFF0.
276When the driver encounters
277this value, it knows that it has finished processing all currently
278available packets.
279Neither this magic value nor its significance are
280documented anywhere in the RealTek data sheets.
281