ethernet controllers based on the AIC-6915 "Starfire" controller chip.
There are single port, dual port and quad port cards, plus one 100baseFX
card. All are 64-bit PCI devices, except one single port model.
The Starfire would be a very nice chip were it not for the fact that
receive buffers have to be longword aligned. This requires buffer
copying in order to achieve proper payload alignment on the alpha.
Payload alignment is enforced on both the alpha and x86 platforms.
The Starfire has several different DMA descriptor formats and transfer
mechanisms. This driver uses frame descriptors for transmission which
can address up to 14 packet fragments, and a single fragment descriptor
for receive. It also uses the producer/consumer model and completion
queues for both transmit and receive. The transmit ring has 128
descriptors and the receive ring has 256.
This driver supports both FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/alpha, and uses newbus
so that it can be compiled as a loadable kernel module. Support for BPF
and hardware multicast filtering is included.
gigabit ethernet adapters. This includes two single port cards
(single mode and multimode fiber) and two dual port cards (also single
mode and multimode fiber). SysKonnect is currently the only
vendor with a dual port gigabit ethernet NIC.
The ports on dual port adapters are treated as separate network
interfaces. Thus, if you have an SK-9844 dual port SX card, you
should have both sk0 and sk1 interfaces attached. Dual port cards
are implemented using two XMAC II chips connected to a single
SysKonnect GEnesis controller. Hence, dual port cards are really
one PCI device, as opposed to two separate PCI devices connected
through a PCI to PCI bridge. Note that SysKonnect's drivers use
the two ports for failover purposes rather that as two separate
interfaces, plus they don't support jumbo frames. This applies to
their Linux driver too. :)
Support is provided for hardware multicast filtering, BPF and
jumbo frames. The SysKonnect cards support TCP checksum offload
however this feature is not currently enabled (hopefully it will
be once we get checksum offload support).
There are still a few things that need to be implemeted, like
the ability to communicate with the on-board LM80 voltage/temperature
monitor, but I wanted to get the driver under CVS control and into
-current so people could bang on it.
A big thanks for SysKonnect for making all their programming info
for these cards (and for their FDDI and token ring cards) available
without NDA (see www.syskonnect.com).
similar to the PNIC I (supported by the pn driver). In fact, it's really
a Macronix 98715A with wake on LAN support added. According to LinkSys,
the PNIC II was jointly developed by Lite-On and Macronis. I get the
feeling Macronix did most of the work. (The datasheet has the Macronix
logo on it, and is in fact nearly identical to the 98715 datasheet, except
for the extra wake on LAN registers.) In any case, the PNIC II works just
fine with the Macronix driver.
The changes are:
- Move PCI ID for the PNIC II from the pn driver to the mx driver.
- Mention PNIC II support in mx.4.
- Mention PNIC II support in RELNOTES.TXT and HARDWARE.TXT.
- Mention that the 6Mbps turbo adapters are supported in HARDWARE.TXT
and RELNOTES.TXT and the wi.4 man page
- Mention turbo adapters in the wicontrol.8 man page and provide a
complete table of available transmit speed settings
ADMtek AL981 "Comet" chipset. The AL981 is yet another DEC tulip clone,
except with simpler receive filter options. The AL981 has a built-in
transceiver, power management support, wake on LAN and flow control.
This chip performs extremely well; it's on par with the ASIX chipset
in terms of speed, which is pretty good (it can do 11.5MB/sec with TCP
easily).
I would have committed this driver sooner, except I ran into one problem
with the AL981 that required a workaround. When the chip is transmitting
at full speed, it will sometimes wedge if you queue a series of packets
that wrap from the end of the transmit descriptor list back to the
beginning. I can't explain why this happens, and none of the other tulip
clones behave this way. The workaround this is to just watch for the end
of the transmit ring and make sure that al_start() breaks out of its
packet queuing loop and waiting until the current batch of transmissions
completes before wrapping back to the start of the ring. Fortunately, this
does not significantly impact transmit performance.
This is one of those things that takes weeks of analysis just to come
up with two or three lines of code changes.
RealTek 8029, NetVin 5000, Winbond W89C940, Surecom NE-34, VIA VT86C926.
(checked with Bill Paul)
Mention the Brooktree Bt878 is supported by the Bt848 driver.
adapter (and some workalikes). Also add man pages and a wicontrol
utility to manipulate some of the card parameters.
This driver was written using information gleaned from the Lucent HCF Light
library, though it does not use any of the HCF Light code itself, mainly
because it's contaminated by the GPL (but also because it's pretty gross).
The HCF Light lacks certain featurs from the full (but proprietary) HCF
library, including 802.11 frame encapsulation support, however it has
just enough register information about the Hermes chip to allow someone
with enough spare time and energy to implement a proper driver. (I would
have prefered getting my hands on the Hermes manual, but that's proprietary
too. For those who are wondering, the Linux driver uses the proprietary
HCF library, but it's provided in object code form only.)
Note that I do not have access to a WavePOINT access point, so I have
only been able to test ad-hoc mode. The wicontrol utility can turn on
BSS mode, but I don't know for certain that the NIC will associate with
an access point correctly. Testers are encouraged to send their results
to me so that I can find out if I screwed up or not.
Networks Tigon 1 and Tigon 2 chipsets. There are a _lot_ of OEM'ed
gigabit ethernet adapters out there which use the Alteon chipset so
this driver covers a fair amount of hardware. I know that it works with
the Alteon AceNIC, 3Com 3c985 and Netgear GA620, however it should also
work with the DEC/Compaq EtherWORKS 1000, Silicon Graphics Gigabit
ethernet board, NEC Gigabit Ethernet board and maybe even the IBM and
and Sun boards. The Netgear board is the cheapest (~$350US) but still
yields fairly good performance.
Support is provided for jumbo frames with all adapters (just set the
MTU to something larger than 1500 bytes), as well as hardware multicast
filtering and vlan tagging (in conjunction with the vlan support in
-current, which I should merge into -stable soon). There are some hooks
for checksum offload support, but they're turned off for now since
FreeBSD doesn't have an officially sanctioned way to support checksum
offloading (yet).
I have not added the 'device ti0' entry to GENERIC since the driver
with all the firmware compiled in is quite large, and it doesn't really
fit into the category of generic hardware.
and Racore 8148 adapters are now supported by the ThunderLAN driver.
The 8165 is just a plain vanilla 10/100 card; the 8148 is a 'multi-
personality' adapter which can support 10baseT, 100baseTX and 100baseFX
if you include the proper modules.
Also update the tl man page to mention the Racore cards.
