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.
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.
Implement priorities.
GENERIC, LINT, files:
Remove remarks about ordering of device names.
GENERIC, LINT:
Sort the devices alphabetically in LINT and GENERIC.
config kernel mumble mumble
line has been obsoleted and removed and with it went all knowledge of
devices on the part of config.
You can still configure a root device (which is used if you give
the "-r" flag) but now with an option:
options ROOTDEVNAME=\"da0s2e\"
The string is parsed by the same code as at the "boot -a" prompt.
At the same time, make the "boot -a" prompt both more able and more
informative.
ALPHA/PC98 people: You will have to adapt a few simple changes
(defining rootdev and dumpdev somewhere else) before config works
for you again, sorry, but it's all in the name of progress.
i386 platform boots, it is no longer ISA-centric, and is fully dynamic.
Most old drivers compile and run without modification via 'compatability
shims' to enable a smoother transition. eisa, isapnp and pccard* are
not yet using the new resource manager. Once fully converted, all drivers
will be loadable, including PCI and ISA.
(Some other changes appear to have snuck in, including a port of Soren's
ATA driver to the Alpha. Soren, back this out if you need to.)
This is a checkpoint of work-in-progress, but is quite functional.
The bulk of the work was done over the last few years by Doug Rabson and
Garrett Wollman.
Approved by: core
perform a cleanup/unifdef sweep over it to tidy things up. The atapi
code is permanently attached to the wd driver and is always probed.
I will add an extra option bit in the flags to disable an atapi probe on
either the master or slave if needed, if people want this.
Remember, this driver is destined to die some time. It's possible that
it will loose all atapi support down the track and only be used for
dumb non-ATA disks and all ata/atapi devices will be handled by the new
ata system.
ATAPI, ATAPI_STATIC and CMD640 are no longer options, all are implicit.
Previously discussed with: sos
keyboard and video card drivers.
Because of the changes, you are required to update your kernel
configuration file now!
The files in sys/dev/syscons are still i386-specific (but less so than
before), and won't compile for alpha and PC98 yet.
syscons still directly accesses the video card registers here and
there; this will be rectified in the later stages.
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.
