controller. These controllers are known as L1D(AR8151) and
L2CB/B2(AR8152). This change adds supports for the following
controllers.
o AR8151 v1.0(L1D) gigabit ethernet controller
o AR8151 v2.0(L1D) gigabit ethernet controller
o AR8152 v1.1(L2CB) fast ethernet controller
o AR8152 v2.0(L2CB2) fast ethernet controller
These controllers have the same feature of AR8131/AR8132 and
support improved power saving control. The user visible change at
this moment is reduced jumbo frame size from 9KB to 6KB. Many
thanks to Atheros for continuing to support FreeBSD.
HW donated by: Atheros Communications, Inc.
controller. These controllers are also known as L1C(AR8131) and
L2C(AR8132) respectively. These controllers resembles the first
generation controller L1 but usage of different descriptor format
and new register mappings over L1 register space requires a new
driver. There are a couple of registers I still don't understand
but the driver seems to have no critical issues for performance and
stability. Currently alc(4) supports the following hardware
features.
o MSI
o TCP Segmentation offload
o Hardware VLAN tag insertion/stripping
o Tx/Rx interrupt moderation
o Hardware statistics counters(dev.alc.%d.stats)
o Jumbo frame
o WOL
AR8131/AR8132 also supports Tx checksum offloading but I disabled
it due to stability issues. I'm not sure this comes from broken
sample boards or hardware bugs. If you know your controller works
without problems you can still enable it. The controller has a
silicon bug for Rx checksum offloading, so the feature was not
implemented.
I'd like to say big thanks to Atheros. Atheros kindly sent sample
boards to me and answered several questions I had.
HW donated by: Atheros Communications, Inc.