VX(4)

NAME
vx - PCI Ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS
device vx0

DESCRIPTION
The vx driver provides support for the 3Com 3c590 and 3c595 EtherLink III and Fast EtherLink III PCI Ethernet cards in 10 Mbps mode. The medium selection can be influenced by the following link flags to the ifconfig(8) command:

link0
    Use the AUI port.
link1
    Use the BNC port.
link2
    Use the UTP port.

DIAGNOSTICS

vx%d: not configured; kernel is built for only %d devices. There are not enough devices in the kernel configuration file for the number of adapters present in the system. Add devices to the configuration file, rebuild the kernel, and reboot.

All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the driver.

CAVEATS
Some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many receive overruns, which cause lost packets. The author has attempted to implement a test for it based on the information supplied by 3Com, but the test resulted mostly in spurious warnings.

The performance of this driver is somewhat limited by the fact that it uses only polled-mode I/O and does not make use of the bus-mastering capability of the cards.

BUGS
The vx driver is known not to reset the adapter correctly following a warm boot on some systems.

The vx driver has not been exhaustively tested with all the models of cards that it claims to support.

HISTORY
The vx device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. It was derived from the ep driver, from which it inherits most of its limitations.

AUTHOR
The vx device driver and this manual page were written by Fred Gray (fgray@rice.edu), based on the work of Herb Peyerl and with the assistance of numerous others.