NAME
nge - National Semiconductor PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
kernel configuration file:
device miibus
device nge
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the
following line in loader.conf(5):
if_nge_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
The nge driver provides support for various NICs based on the National
Semiconductor DP83820 and DP83821 Gigabit Ethernet controller chips.
The DP83820 supports TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which
means it can be used with either copper or 1000baseX fiber applications.
The DP83820 supports TCP/IP checksum offload and VLAN tagging/insertion
as well as a 2048-bit multicast hash filter and up to 4 pattern match
buffers.
Most cards also use the DP83861 10/100/1000 copper gigabit transceiver
chip, which supports autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in
full or half duplex.
The DP83820 and DP83821 also support jumbo frames, 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. Using jumbo frames can greatly improve
performance for certain tasks, such as file transfers and data streaming.
The nge 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. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can
also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex
modes.
100baseTX Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. The ifconfig(8)
mediaopt option can also be used to select either
full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
1000baseTX Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair. full-duplex and
half-duplex modes are supported.
1000baseSX Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation. Both full-duplex
and half-duplex modes are supported.
The nge driver supports the following media options:
full-duplex Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex Force half duplex operation.
The nge driver also supports one special link option for 1000baseTX
cards:
link0 With 1000baseTX cards, establishing a link between two ports
requires that one port be configured as a master and the other a
slave. With autonegotiation, the master/slave settings will be
chosen automatically. However when manually selecting the link
state, it is necessary to force one side of the link to be a
master and the other a slave. The nge driver configures the ports
as slaves by default. Setting the link0 flag with ifconfig(8)
will set a port as a master instead.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).
HARDWARE
The nge driver supports National Semiconductor DP83820 and DP83821 based
Gigabit Ethernet adapters including:
· Addtron AEG320T
· Ark PC SOHO-GA2500T (32-bit PCI) and SOHO-GA2000T (64-bit PCI)
· Asante FriendlyNet GigaNIX 1000TA and 1000TPC
· D-Link DGE-500T
· Linksys EG1032, revision 1
· Netgear GA621
· Netgear GA622T
· SMC EZ Card 1000 (SMC9462TX)
· Surecom Technology EP-320G-TX
· Trendware TEG-PCITX (32-bit PCI) and TEG-PCITX2 (64-bit PCI)
SYSCTL VARIABLES
The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and
loader(8) tunables:
dev.nge.%d.int_holdoff
Maximum amount of time to delay interrupt processing in units of
100us. The accepted range is 0 to 255, the default is 1(100us).
Value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation. The
interface has to be brought down and up again before a change
takes effect.
DIAGNOSTICS
nge%d: couldn’t map memory A fatal initialization error has occurred.
nge%d: couldn’t map ports A fatal initialization error has occurred.
nge%d: couldn’t map interrupt A fatal initialization error has occurred.
nge%d: no memory for softc struct! The driver failed to allocate memory
for per-device instance information during initialization.
nge%d: failed to enable memory mapping! The driver failed to initialize
PCI shared memory mapping. This might happen if the card is not in a
bus-master slot.
nge%d: no memory for jumbo buffers! The driver failed to allocate memory
for jumbo frames during initialization.
nge%d: watchdog timeout The device has stopped responding to the
network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
SEE ALSO
altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), polling(4),
vlan(4), ifconfig(8)
National Semiconductor DP83820 datasheet, http://www.national.com.
National Semiconductor DP83861 datasheet, http://www.national.com.
HISTORY
The nge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.4.
AUTHORS
The nge driver was written by Bill Paul 〈wpaul@bsdi.com〉.