are two supported chips, the NetChip 1080 (only prototypes available)
and the EzLink cable. Any other cable should be supported however as they
are all very much alike (there is a difference between them wrt
performance).
It uses Netgraph.
This driver was mostly written by Doug Ambrisko and Julian Elischer and
I would like to thank Whistle for yet another contribution. And my
aplogies to them for me sitting on the driver for so long (2 months).
Also, many thanks to Reid Augustin from NetChip for providing me with a
prototype of their 1080 chip.
Be aware of the fact that this driver is very immature and has only been
tested very lightly. If someone feels like learning about Netgraph however
this is an excellent driver to start playing with.
vintage system, well before the ppbus changes. When I called it an
"example" module, I meant as an example for the rest of the ppbus client
drivers, not that it was worthless. I'll mail my 5.8MB world.log to
anybody who doesn't believe me.
Wrongly accused by: obrien
NICs. (Finally!) The PCMCIA, ISA and PCI varieties are all supported,
though only the ISA and PCI ones will work on the alpha for now.
PCCARD, ISA and PCI attachments are all provided. Also provided an
ancontrol(8) utility for configuring the NIC, man pages, and updated
pccard.conf.sample. ISA cards are supported in both ISA PnP and hard-wired
mode, although you must configure the kernel explicitly to support the
hardwired mode since you have to know the I/O address and port ahead
of time.
Special thanks to Doug Ambrisko for doing the initial newbus hackery
and getting it to work in infrastructure mode.
USB-EL1202A chipset. Between this and the other two drivers, we should
have support for pretty much every USB ethernet adapter on the market.
The only other USB chip that I know of is the SMC USB97C196, and right
now I don't know of any adapters that use it (including the ones made
by SMC :/ ).
Note that the CATC chip supports a nifty feature: read and write combining.
This allows multiple ethernet packets to be transfered in a single USB
bulk in/out transaction. However I'm again having trouble with large
bulk in transfers like I did with the ADMtek chip, which leads me to
believe that our USB stack needs some work before we can really make
use of this feature. When/if things improve, I intend to revisit the
aue and cue drivers. For now, I've lost enough sanity points.
Kawasaki LSI KL5KUSB101B chip, including the LinkSys USB10T, the
Entrega NET-USB-E45, the Peracom USB Ethernet Adapter, the 3Com
3c19250 and the ADS Technologies USB-10BT. This device is 10mbs
half-duplex only, so there's miibus or ifmedia support. This device
also requires firmware to be loaded into it, however KLSI allows
redistribution of the firmware images (I specifically asked about
this; they said it was ok).
Special thanks to Annelise Anderson for getting me in touch with
KLSI (eventually) and thanks to KLSI for providing the necessary
programming info.
Highlights:
- Add driver files to /sys/dev/usb
- update usbdevs and regenerate attendate files
- update usb_quirks.c
- Update HARDWARE.TXT and RELNOTES.TXT for i386 and alpha
- Update LINT, GENERIC and others for i386, alpha and pc98
- Add man page
- Add module
- Update sysinstall and userconfig.c
USB ethernet chip. Adapters that use this chip include the LinkSys
USB100TX. There are a few others, but I'm not certain of their
availability in the U.S. I used an ADMtek eval board for development.
Note that while the ADMtek chip is a 100Mbps device, you can't really
get 100Mbps speeds over USB. Regardless, this driver uses miibus to
allow speed and duplex mode selection as well as autonegotiation.
Building and kldloading the driver as a module is also supported.
Note that in order to make this driver work, I had to make what some
may consider an ugly hack to sys/dev/usb/usbdi.c. The usbd_transfer()
function will use tsleep() for synchronous transfers that don't complete
right away. This is a problem since there are times when we need to
do sync transfers from an interrupt context (i.e. when reading registers
from the MAC via the control endpoint), where tsleep() us a no-no.
My hack allows the driver to have the code poll for transfer completion
subject to the xfer->timeout timeout rather that calling tsleep().
This hack is controlled by a quirk entry and is only enabled for the
ADMtek device.
Now, I'm sure there are a few of you out there ready to jump on me
and suggest some other approach that doesn't involve a busy wait. The
only solution that might work is to handle the interrupts in a kernel
thread, where you may have something resembling a process context that
makes it okay to tsleep(). This is lovely, except we don't have any
mechanism like that now, and I'm not about to implement such a thing
myself since it's beyond the scope of driver development. (Translation:
I'll be damned if I know how to do it.) If FreeBSD ever aquires such
a mechanism, I'll be glad to revisit the driver to take advantage of
it. In the meantime, I settled for what I perceived to be the solution
that involved the least amount of code changes. In general, the hit
is pretty light.
Also note that my only USB test box has a UHCI controller: I haven't
I don't have a machine with an OHCI controller available.
Highlights:
- Updated usb_quirks.* to add UQ_NO_TSLEEP quirk for ADMtek part.
- Updated usbdevs and regenerated generated files
- Updated HARDWARE.TXT and RELNOTES.TXT files
- Updated sysinstall/device.c and userconfig.c
- Updated kernel configs -- device aue0 is commented out by default
- Updated /sys/conf/files
- Added new kld module directory
which it replaces. The new driver supports all of the chips supported
by the ones it replaces, as well as many DEC/Intel 21143 10/100 cards.
This also completes my quest to convert things to miibus and add
Alpha support.
- Convert to new bus attachment scheme. Thanks to Blaz Zupan for doing
the initial work here. One thing I changed was to have the attach
and detach routines work like the PCI drivers, which means that in
theory you should be able to load and unload the driver like the PCI
NIC drivers, however the pccard support for this hasn't settled down
yet so it doesn't quite work. Once the pccard work is done, I'll have
to revisit this.
- Add device wi0 to PCCARD. If we're lucky, people should be able to
install via their WaveLAN cards now.
- Add support for signal strength caching. The wicontrol utility has
also been updated to allow zeroing and displaying the signal strength
cache.
- Add a /sys/modules/wi directory and fix a Makefile to builf if_wi.ko.
Currently this module is only built for the i386 platform, though once
the pccard stuff is done it should be able to work on the alpha too.
(Theoretically you should be able to plug one of the WaveLAN/IEEE ISA
cards into an alpha with an ISA slot, but we'll see how that turns out.
- Update LINT to use only device wi0. There is no true ISA version of
the WaveLAN/IEEE so we'll never use an ISA attachment.
- Update files.i386 so that if_wi is dependent on card.
Been in production for 3 years now. Gives Instant Frame relay to if_sr
and if_ar drivers, and PPPOE support soon. See:
ftp://ftp.whistle.com/pub/archie/netgraph/index.html
for on-line manual pages.
Reviewed by: Doug Rabson (dfr@freebsd.org)
Obtained from: Whistle CVS tree
for the AN985 "Centaur" chip, which is apparently the next genetation
of the "Comet." The AN985 is also a tulip clone and is similar to the
AL981 except that it uses a 99C66 EEPROM and a serial MII interface
(instead of direct access to the PHY registers).
Also updated various documentation to mention the AN985 and created
a loadable module.
I don't think there are any cards that use this chip on the market yet:
the datasheet I got from ADMtek has boxes with big X's in them where the
diagrams should be, and the sample boards I got have chips without any
artwork on them.
the Davicom DM9100 and DM9102 chipsets, including the Jaton Corporation
XPressNet. Datasheet is available from www.davicom8.com.
The DM910x chips are still more tulip clones. The API is reproduced
pretty faithfully, unfortunately the performance is pretty bad. The
transmitter seems to have a lot of problems DMAing multi-fragment
packets. The only way to make it work reliably is to coalesce transmitted
packets into a single contiguous buffer. The Linux driver (written by
Davicom) actually does something similar to this. I can't recomment this
NIC as anything more than a "connectivity solution."
This driver uses newbus and miibus and is supported on both i386
and alpha platforms.
SiS 900 and SiS 7016 PCI fast ethernet chipsets. Full manuals for the
SiS chips can be found at www.sis.com.tw.
This is a fairly simple chipset. The receiver uses a 128-bit multicast
hash table and single perfect entry for the station address. Transmit and
receive DMA and FIFO thresholds are easily tuneable. Documentation is
pretty decent and performance is not bad, even on my crufty 486. This
driver uses newbus and miibus and is supported on both the i386 and
alpha architectures.
PCI fast ethernet controller. Currently, the only card I know that uses
this chip is the D-Link DFE-550TX. (Don't ask me where to buy these: the
only cards I have are samples sent to me by D-Link.)
This driver is the first to make use of the miibus code once I'm sure
it all works together nicely, I'll start converting the other drivers.
The Sundance chip is a clone of the 3Com 3c90x Etherlink XL design
only with its own register layout. Support is provided for ifmedia,
hardware multicast filtering, bridging and promiscuous mode.
MII-compliant PHY drivers. Many 10/100 ethernet NICs available today
either use an MII transceiver or have built-in transceivers that can
be programmed using an MII interface. It makes sense then to separate
this support out into common code instead of duplicating it in all
of the NIC drivers. The mii code also handles all of the media
detection, selection and reporting via the ifmedia interface.
This is basically the same code from NetBSD's /sys/dev/mii, except
it's been adapted to FreeBSD's bus architecture. The advantage to this
is that it automatically allows everything to be turned into a
loadable module. There are some common functions for use in drivers
once an miibus has been attached (mii_mediachg(), mii_pollstat(),
mii_tick()) as well as individual PHY drivers. There is also a
generic driver for all PHYs that aren't handled by a specific driver.
It's possible to do this because all 10/100 PHYs implement the same
general register set in addition to their vendor-specific register
sets, so for the most part you can use one driver for pretty much
any PHY. There are a couple of oddball exceptions though, hence
the need to have specific drivers.
There are two layers: the generic "miibus" layer and the PHY driver
layer. The drivers are child devices of "miibus" and the "miibus" is
a child of a given NIC driver. The "miibus" code and the PHY drivers
can actually be compiled and kldoaded as completely separate modules
or compiled together into one module. For the moment I'm using the
latter approach since the code is relatively small.
Currently there are only three PHY drivers here: the generic driver,
the built-in 3Com XL driver and the NS DP83840 driver. I'll be adding
others later as I convert various NIC drivers to use this code.
I realize that I'm cvs adding this stuff instead of importing it
onto a separate vendor branch, but in my opinion the import approach
doesn't really offer any significant advantage: I'm going to be
maintaining this stuff and writing my own PHY drivers one way or
the other.
a module. Also modified the code to work on FreeBSD/alpha and added
device vr0 to the alpha GENERIC config.
While I was in the neighborhood, I noticed that I was still using
#define NFPX 1 in all of the Makefiles that I'd copied from the fxp
module. I don't really use #define Nfoo X so it didn't matter, but
I decided to customize this correctly anyway.
