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.
files. They are now both basically the same. I also modified the driver
list in HARDWARE.TXT: add the adw and isp drivers, and indicate that the
uha driver isn't yet supported under CAM.
This includes specific mention of all supported NCR and BusLogic models,
additional qualification of the supported DPT and QLogic models, and some
additions to the list of supported onboard Adaptec chips.
The hope is, of course, that this will lead to fewer questions like "is the
froboz SCSI controller supported?"
I think the formatting of the new entries looks okay, but someone with a
better eye for things like that might want to look at this.
