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.
on CDs and FTP sites.
o Collapse some redundant code.
o Fix typo'd menu.
o Restrict searches properly to packages rather than categories.
o Small tweaks to signal handling.
All RELENG_3 candidates.
I simply forgot that I'd already proven this to be a "really good idea that
unfortunately didn't work at all" the *last* time I tried it. Now
I remember. Hmmm. I WILL defeat this evil problem.
feature of packages now so that no version info is embedded.
o Add a default X desktop menu offering afterstep, enlightenment, KDE, GNOME
and Windowmaker desktops instead of the boring twm(1) based one if the
user so chooses. This will require a little testing.
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.
to now detect that CD you just remembered to put in the drive or that
pccard NIC that you've inserted (anybody can put pccardd in an mfsroot image
now you know.. :)
Requested by: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.Stanford.EDU>
orthogonal to the other entries).
Clean up X selection code a bit.
Choose proper architecture subdirectories on mirror sites now that we've
gone fully to the new multi-arch directory scheme.
Now we know which variables are internal and which need to be
backed to /etc/rc.conf.site. rc.conf is not touched now.
Also kget kernel change information back properly and set up a loader.rc
file to use it.
on the ASIX AX88140A chip. Update /sys/conf/files, RELNOTES.TXT,
/sys/i388/i386/userconfig.c, sysinstall/devices.c, GENERIC and LINT
accordingly.
For now, the only board that I know of that uses this chip is the
Alfa Inc. GFC2204. (Its predecessor, the GFC2202, was a DEC tulip card.)
Thanks again to Ulf for obtaining the board for me. If anyone runs
across another, please feel free to update the man page and/or the
release notes. (The same applies for the other drivers.)
FreeBSD should now have support for all of the DEC tulip workalike
chipsets currently on the market (Macronix, Lite-On, Winbond, ASIX).
And unless I'm mistaken, it should also have support for all PCI fast
ethernet chipsets in general (except maybe the SMC FEAST chip, which
nobody seems to ever use, including SMC). Now if only we could convince
3Com, Intel or whoever to cough up some documentation for gigabit
ethernet hardware.
Also updated RELNOTEX.TXT to mention that the SVEC PN102TX is supported
by the Macronix driver (assuming you actually have an SVEC PN102TX with
a Macronix chip on it; I tried to order a PN102TX once and got a box
labeled 'Hawking Technology PN102TX' that had a VIA Rhine board inside
it).
PCI fast ethernet adapters, plus man pages.
if_pn.c: Netgear FA310TX model D1, LinkSys LNE100TX, Matrox FastNIC 10/100,
various other PNIC devices
if_mx.c: NDC Communications SOHOware SFA100 (Macronix 98713A), various
other boards based on the Macronix 98713, 98713A, 98715, 98715A
and 98725 chips
if_vr.c: D-Link DFE530-TX, other boards based on the VIA Rhine and
Rhine II chips (note: the D-Link and certain other cards
that actually use a Rhine II chip still return the PCI
device ID of the Rhine I. I don't know why, and it doesn't
really matter since the driver treats both chips the same
anyway.)
if_wb.c: Trendware TE100-PCIE and various other cards based on the
Winbond W89C840F chip (the Trendware card is identical to
the sample boards Winbond sent me, so who knows how many
clones there are running around)
All drivers include support for ifmedia, BPF and hardware multicast
filtering.
Also updated GENERIC, LINT, RELNOTES.TXT, userconfig and
sysinstall device list.
I also have a driver for the ASIX AX88140A in the works.
o Move fixups into extraction routine so all consumers don't have to duplicate
the right behavior.
o Make some things more orthogonal (just for asthetics sake)
o Add option to go back and do it again if XF86Setup fails (possibly with
a different setup - this one has always annoyed me).
RealTek 8129/8139 chipset like I've been threatening. Update kernel
configs, userconfig.c, relnotes and sysinstall. No man page yet;
comming soon.
I consider this driver stable enough that I want to give it some
exposure in -current.
route. If your nameserver config is wrong, this will otherwise hang for
the default resolver timeout (75 seconds), leading people to think that
the system has hung.
various ports don't complain about it. It also requires that the pkg
registration bits be stick into the Xbin tarball so that they'll be
present in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/pkgreg.tar.gz. The registration tarball
is removed upon first use to prevent it later spamming a genuine build
from ports if inadvertently extracted again.
