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).
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.
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.
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.
SCSI controllers, respectively.
Once these drivers are tested on the alpha, these man pages can probably be
moved up a directory to reflect the fact that they're architecture
independent.
An mdoc guru should probably look at the AUTHORS sections in both of these
pages -- the .An macro seems to cause strange spacing problems.
Reviewed by: ken
Submitted by: gibbs
