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.