NAME
vge - VIA Networking Technologies VT6122 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 vge
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the
following line in loader.conf(5):
if_vge_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
The vge driver provides support for various NICs and embedded Ethernet
interfaces based on the VIA Networking Technologies VT6122 Gigabit
Ethernet controller chips.
The VT6122 is a 33/66Mhz 64-bit PCI device which combines a tri-speed MAC
with an integrated 10/100/1000 copper PHY. (Some older cards use an
external PHY.) The MAC supports TCP/IP hardware checksums (IPv4 only),
TCP large send, VLAN tag insertion and stripping, as well as VLAN
filtering, a 64-entry CAM filter and a 64-entry VLAN filter, 64-bit
multicast hash filter, 4 separate transmit DMA queues, flow control and
jumbo frames up to 16K in size. The VT6122 has a 16K receive FIFO and
48K transmit FIFO.
The vge driver takes advantage of the VT6122’s checksum offload and VLAN
tagging features, as well as the jumbo frame and CAM filter support. The
CAM filter is used for multicast address filtering to provide 64 perfect
multicast address filter support. If it is necessary for the interface
to join more than 64 multicast groups, the driver will switch over to
using the hash filter.
The jumbo frame support can be enabled by setting the interface MTU to
any value larger than the default of 1500 bytes, up to a maximum of 9000
bytes. The receive and transmit checksum offload support can be toggled
on and off using the ifconfig(8) utility.
The vge 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. The ifconfig(8)
mediaopt option can also be used to select either
full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
The vge driver supports the following media options:
full-duplex Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex Force half duplex operation.
The vge 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 vge 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 vge driver supports VIA Networking VT3119 and VT6122 based Gigabit
Ethernet adapters including:
· VIA Networking LAN-on-motherboard Gigabit Ethernet
· ZyXEL GN650-T 64-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1701)
· ZyXEL GN670-T 32-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1702)
DIAGNOSTICS
vge%d: couldn’t map memory A fatal initialization error has occurred.
vge%d: couldn’t map ports A fatal initialization error has occurred.
vge%d: couldn’t map interrupt A fatal initialization error has occurred.
vge%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.
vge%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)
HISTORY
The vge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.3.
AUTHORS
The vge driver was written by Bill Paul 〈wpaul@windriver.com〉.