1 .\" Copyright (c) 1997, 1998
2 .\" Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>. All rights reserved.
4 .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
5 .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
7 .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
8 .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
9 .\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
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11 .\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
12 .\" 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
13 .\" must display the following acknowledgement:
14 .\" This product includes software developed by Bill Paul.
15 .\" 4. Neither the name of the author nor the names of any co-contributors
16 .\" may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
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19 .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY Bill Paul AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
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38 .Nd "VIA Technologies Rhine I/II/III Ethernet device driver"
40 To compile this driver into the kernel,
41 place the following lines in your
42 kernel configuration file:
43 .Bd -ragged -offset indent
48 Alternatively, to load the driver as a
49 module at boot time, place the following line in
51 .Bd -literal -offset indent
57 driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
58 controllers based on the VIA Technologies VT3043 Rhine I,
59 VT86C100A Rhine II, and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet
62 The VIA Rhine chips use bus master DMA and have a descriptor layout
63 designed to resemble that of the DEC 21x4x
67 layout is different however and the receive filter in the Rhine chips
68 is much simpler and is programmed through registers rather than by
69 downloading a special setup frame through the transmit DMA engine.
70 Transmit and receive DMA buffers must be longword
72 The Rhine chips are meant to be interfaced with external
73 physical layer devices via an MII bus.
75 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
79 driver supports the following media types:
80 .Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
82 Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
83 The user can manually override
84 the autoselected mode by adding media options to the
91 option can also be used to select either
97 Set 100Mbps (Fast Fthernet) operation.
100 option can also be used to select either
109 driver supports the following media options:
110 .Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
112 Force full duplex operation
114 Force half duplex operation.
117 Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported
119 For more information on configuring this device, see
124 driver supports VIA Technologies Rhine I, Rhine II, and Rhine III based
125 Fast Ethernet adapters including:
135 Hawking Technologies PN102TX
137 Soekris Engineering net5501
140 The following variables are available as
143 .Bl -tag -width indent
144 .It Va dev.vr.%d.stats
145 Display lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver.
149 .It "vr%d: couldn't map memory"
150 A fatal initialization error has occurred.
151 .It "vr%d: couldn't map interrupt"
152 A fatal initialization error has occurred.
153 .It "vr%d: watchdog timeout"
154 The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
155 the network connection (cable).
156 .It "vr%d: no memory for rx list"
157 The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
158 .It "vr%d: no memory for tx list"
159 The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the transmitter ring when
160 allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf chain into a cluster.
161 .It "vr%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0"
162 This message applies only to adapters which support power
164 Some operating systems place the controller in low power
165 mode when shutting down, and some PCI BIOSes fail to bring the chip
166 out of this state before configuring it.
167 The controller loses all of
168 its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if the BIOS does not set
169 it back to full power mode in time, it will not be able to configure it
171 The driver tries to detect this condition and bring
172 the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this may not be
173 enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.
175 you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach
176 the device as a network interface, you will have to perform second
177 warm boot to have the device properly configured.
179 Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another
181 If you power down your system prior to booting
183 the card should be configured correctly.
194 .%T The VIA Technologies VT86C100A data sheet
195 .%U http://www.via.com.tw
200 device driver first appeared in
205 driver was written by
206 .An Bill Paul Aq wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu .
210 driver always copies transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
211 buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify the Rhine chips.
212 If buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the
213 supplied buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location.
214 This buffer copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but cannot
216 On faster machines (e.g.\& a Pentium II), the performance
217 impact is much less noticeable.