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 miibusdevice nge
Alternatively, to load the driver as a
module at boot time, place the following line in
loader.conf5:
if_nge_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
The
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 also supports 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
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.conf5.
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
driver supports the following media options:
full-duplex
Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex
Force half duplex operation.
The
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
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
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
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)
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).
