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.
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.
I backed-out the changes in -current and didn't touch stable at all (I
thought I had my patch order reversed, not what actually happened).
AIEEE! I can't even blame the crack for this one since I broke my
crack pipe a few weeks ago. I think sleep deprivation gets the blame
for this one.
Medal for noticing this one goes to: Jim Bloom <bloom@acm.org>
bringing in DHCP support. The only thing I left out were Poul-Henning's
newfs changes since I'm not sure if he's brought the rest of that support
into -stable yet. If it turns out that this is the case, I'll MFC those
changes too.
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.
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.
Networks Tigon 1 and Tigon 2 chipsets. There are a _lot_ of OEM'ed
gigabit ethernet adapters out there which use the Alteon chipset so
this driver covers a fair amount of hardware. I know that it works with
the Alteon AceNIC, 3Com 3c985 and Netgear GA620, however it should also
work with the DEC/Compaq EtherWORKS 1000, Silicon Graphics Gigabit
ethernet board, NEC Gigabit Ethernet board and maybe even the IBM and
and Sun boards. The Netgear board is the cheapest (~$350US) but still
yields fairly good performance.
Support is provided for jumbo frames with all adapters (just set the
MTU to something larger than 1500 bytes), as well as hardware multicast
filtering and vlan tagging (in conjunction with the vlan support in
-current, which I should merge into -stable soon). There are some hooks
for checksum offload support, but they're turned off for now since
FreeBSD doesn't have an officially sanctioned way to support checksum
offloading (yet).
I have not added the 'device ti0' entry to GENERIC since the driver
with all the firmware compiled in is quite large, and it doesn't really
fit into the category of generic hardware.
to now detect that CD you just remembered to put in the drive or that
pccard NIC that you've inserted (anybody can put pccardd in an mfsroot image
now you know.. :)
Requested by: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.Stanford.EDU>
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.
RealTek 8129/8139 chipset like I've been threatening. Update kernel
configs, userconfig.c, relnotes and sysinstall. No man page yet;
comming soon.
I consider this driver stable enough that I want to give it some
exposure in -current.
apparently, unlike the IDE or SCSI CDROM drivers, this is magically
special-cased for audio CDs. This also might explain what happened
with scd (Sony) CDs also since I made the same change there. A follow-up
commit will fix that. Thanks, Dave!
PR: 6576
Submitted by: Dave Marquardt <marquard@zilker.net>
again.
2. Don't create slice entries when running multi-user; it adds far too
much to sysinstall's startup time. User is expected to have correct
slice entries after system is installed.
probed in sysinstall. Rather than make template devices and use up lots
of inodes, also restricting the number of devices that can be dealt with,
mknod all necessary devices as necessary using built-in information.
This removes a number of constraints on the number and type of devices
that sysinstall can see.
