NAME
vge —
VIA Networking Technologies
VT6122 PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver
SYNOPSIS
vge* at pci? dev ? function ?
Configuration of PHYs is also necessary. See
mii(4).
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
- The driver failed to initialize PCI shared memory mapping.
This might happen if the card is not in a bus-master slot.
- vge%d: unable to map interrupt
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- vge%d: watchdog timeout
- The device has stopped responding to the network, or there
is a problem with the network connection (cable). Driver resets the
device.
SEE ALSO
arp(4),
ciphy(4),
mii(4),
netintro(4),
ukphy(4),
vlan(4),
ifconfig(8)
HISTORY
The
vge device driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 5.3 and then in
NetBSD
3.0.
AUTHORS
The
vge driver was written by
Bill
Paul
<
wpaul@windriver.com>.
The
NetBSD port was done by
Jaromir
Dolecek ⟨jdolecek@NetBSD.org⟩.
BUGS
VLAN packet filtering is done in software at the moment, though using hardware
VLAN tagging.