NAME
ale - Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit/Fast Ethernet driver
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
kernel configuration file:
device miibus
device ale
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the
following line in loader.conf(5):
if_ale_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
The ale device driver provides support for Atheros AR8121 PCI Express
Gigabit Ethernet controllers and Atheros AR8113/AR8114 PCI Express Fast
Ethernet controllers.
All LOMs supported by the ale driver have TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload for
both receive and transmit, TCP segmentation offload (TSO), hardware VLAN
tag stripping/insertion features, Wake On Lan (WOL) and an interrupt
coalescing/moderation mechanism as well as a 64-bit multicast hash
filter.
The AR8121 also supports Jumbo Frames (up to 8132 bytes), which can be
configured via the interface MTU setting. Selecting an MTU larger than
1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter to receive
and transmit Jumbo Frames.
The ale driver supports the following media types:
autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type and options. The
user can manually override the autoselected mode by adding
media options to rc.conf(5).
10baseT/UTP Set 10Mbps operation.
100baseTX Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
1000baseTX Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair.
The ale driver supports the following media options:
full-duplex Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex Force half duplex operation.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).
HARDWARE
The ale device driver provides support for the following Ethernet
controllers:
· Atheros AR8113 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
· Atheros AR8114 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
· Atheros AR8121 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
LOADER TUNABLES
Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or
stored in loader.conf(5).
hw.ale.msi_disable
This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. The
default value is 0.
hw.ale.msix_disable
This tunable disables MSI-X support on the Ethernet hardware.
The default value is 0.
SYSCTL VARIABLES
The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and
loader(8) tunables:
dev.ale.%d.int_rx_mod
Maximum amount of time to delay receive interrupt processing in
units of 1us. The accepted range is 0 to 130000, the default is
30(30us). Value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation.
dev.ale.%d.int_tx_mod
Maximum amount of time to delay transmit interrupt processing in
units of 1us. The accepted range is 0 to 130000, the default is
1000(1ms). Value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation.
dev.ale.%d.process_limit
Maximum amount of Rx frames to be processed in the event loop
before rescheduling a taskqueue. The accepted range is 32 to
255, the default value is 128 events. The interface does not
need to be brought down and up again before a change takes
effect.
SEE ALSO
altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4),
ifconfig(8)
HISTORY
The ale driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon 〈yongari@FreeBSD.org〉. It
first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1.