1 .\" Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999
2 .\" Bill Paul <wpaul@ee.columbia.edu>. All rights reserved.
4 .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
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14 .\" This product includes software developed by Bill Paul.
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31 .\" $FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/dc.4,v 1.6.2.9 2003/02/17 21:20:39 trhodes Exp $
32 .\" $DragonFly: src/share/man/man4/dc.4,v 1.10 2007/09/29 08:33:47 swildner Exp $
39 .Nd "DEC/Intel 21143 and clone 10/100 ethernet driver"
46 driver provides support for several PCI fast ethernet adapters and
47 embedded controllers based on the following chipsets:
49 .Bl -bullet -compact -offset indent
53 Macronix 98713, 98713A, 98715, 98715A and 98725
55 Davicom DM9100, DM9102 and DM9102A
57 ASIX Electronics AX88140A and AX88141
59 ADMtek AL981 Comet and AN985 Centaur
61 Lite-On 82c168 and 82c169 PNIC
63 Lite-On/Macronix 82c115 PNIC II
65 Conexant LANfinity RS7112 (miniPCI)
68 All of these chips have the same general register layout, DMA
69 descriptor format and method of operation.
70 All of the clone chips
71 are based on the 21143 design with various modifications.
73 21143 itself has support for 10baseT, BNC, AUI, MII and symbol
74 media attachments, 10 and 100Mbps speeds in full or half duplex,
75 built in NWAY autonegotiation and wake on LAN.
77 offers several receive filter programming options including
78 perfect filtering, inverse perfect filtering and hash table
81 Some clone chips duplicate the 21143 fairly closely while others
82 only maintain superficial similarities.
85 Others use different receiver filter programming
87 At least one supports only chained DMA descriptors
88 (most support both chained descriptors and contiguously allocated
89 fixed size rings). Some chips (especially the PNIC) also have
93 driver does its best to provide generalized support for all
94 of these chipsets in order to keep special case code to a minimum.
96 These chips are used by many vendors which makes it
97 difficult to provide a complete list of all supported cards.
99 following NICs are known to work with the
103 .Bl -bullet -compact -offset indent
105 Digital DE500-BA 10/100 (21143, non-MII)
107 Built in 10Mbps only ethernet on Compaq Presario 7900 series
108 desktops (21143, non-MII)
110 Built in ethernet on LinkSys EtherFast 10/100 Instant GigaDrive (DM9102, MII)
112 Kingston KNE100TX (21143, MII)
114 D-Link DFE-570TX (21143, MII, quad port)
116 NDC SOHOware SFA110 (98713A)
118 SVEC PN102-TX (98713)
120 CNet Pro120A (98715A or 98713A) and CNet Pro120B (98715)
122 Compex RL100-TX (98713 or 98713A)
124 LinkSys LNE100TX (PNIC 82c168, 82c169)
126 NetGear FA310-TX Rev. D1, D2 or D3 (PNIC 82c169)
128 Matrox FastNIC 10/100 (PNIC 82c168, 82c169)
130 Kingston KNE110TX (PNIC 82c169)
132 LinkSys LNE100TX v2.0 (PNIC II 82c115)
134 Jaton XpressNet (Davicom DM9102)
136 Alfa Inc GFC2204 (ASIX AX88140A)
138 CNet Pro110B (ASIX AX88140A)
143 driver supports the following media types:
145 .Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
147 Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
148 The user can manually override
149 the autoselected mode by adding media options to the
153 Note: the built-in NWAY autonegotiation on the original PNIC 82c168
154 chip is horribly broken and is not supported by the
156 driver at this time (see the
158 section for details).
159 The original 82c168 appears
160 on very early revisions of the LinkSys LNE100TX and Matrox FastNIC.
162 Set 10Mbps operation.
165 option can also be used to enable
174 Set 100Mbps (fast ethernet) operation.
177 option can also be used to enable
189 driver supports the following media options:
191 .Bl -tag -width xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
193 Force full duplex operation.
194 The interface will operate in
195 half duplex mode if this media option is not specified.
198 Note that the 100baseTX media type may not be available on certain
199 Intel 21143 adapters which support 10mbps media attachments only.
200 For more information on configuring this device, see
204 .It "dc%d: couldn't map ports/memory"
205 A fatal initialization error has occurred.
206 .It "dc%d: couldn't map interrupt"
207 A fatal initialization error has occurred.
208 .It "dc%d: watchdog timeout"
209 A packet was queued for transmission and a transmit command was
210 issued, but the device failed to acknowledge the transmission
211 before a timeout expired.
212 This can happen if the device is unable
213 to deliver interrupts for some reason, of if there is a problem with
214 the network connection (cable or network equipment) that results in a loss
216 .It "dc%d: no memory for rx list"
217 The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
218 .It "dc%d: TX underrun -- increasing TX threshold"
219 The device generated a transmit underrun error while attempting to
220 DMA and transmit a packet.
221 This happens if the host is not able to
222 DMA the packet data into the NIC's FIFO fast enough.
224 will dynamically increase the transmit start threshold so that
225 more data must be DMAed into the FIFO before the NIC will start
226 transmitting it onto the wire.
227 .It "dc%d: TX underrun -- using store and forward mode"
228 The device continued to generate transmit underruns even after all
229 possible transmit start threshold settings had been tried, so the
230 driver programmed the chip for store and forward mode.
232 the NIC will not begin transmission until the entire packet has been
233 transferred into its FIFO memory.
234 .It "dc%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0"
235 This message applies only to adapters which support power
237 Some operating systems place the controller in low power
238 mode when shutting down, and some PCI BIOSes fail to bring the chip
239 out of this state before configuring it.
240 The controller loses all of
241 its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if the BIOS does not set
242 it back to full power mode in time, it won't be able to configure it
244 The driver tries to detect this condition and bring
245 the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this may not be
246 enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.
248 you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach
249 the device as a network interface, you will have to perform a second
250 warm boot to have the device properly configured.
252 Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another
254 If you power down your system prior to booting
256 the card should be configured correctly.
267 .%T ADMtek AL981, AL983 and AL985 data sheets
268 .%O http://www.admtek.com.tw
271 .%T ASIX Electronics AX88140A and AX88141 data sheets
272 .%O http://www.asix.com.tw
275 .%T Davicom DM9102 data sheet
276 .%O http://www.davicom.com.tw
279 .%T Intel 21143 Hardware Reference Manual
280 .%O http://developer.intel.com
283 .%T Macronix 98713/A, 98715/A and 98725 data sheets
284 .%O http://www.macronix.com
287 .%T Macronix 98713/A and 98715/A app notes
288 .%O http://www.macronix.com
293 device driver first appeared in
298 driver was written by
299 .An Bill Paul Aq wpaul@ee.columbia.edu .
301 The Macronix application notes claim that in order to put the
302 chips in normal operation, the driver must write a certain magic
303 number into the CSR16 register.
304 The numbers are documented in
305 the app notes, but the exact meaning of the bits is not.
307 The 98713A seems to have a problem with 10Mbps full duplex mode.
308 The transmitter works but the receiver tends to produce many
309 unexplained errors leading to very poor overall performance.
311 98715A does not exhibit this problem.
312 All other modes on the
313 98713A seem to work correctly.
315 The original 82c168 PNIC chip has built in NWAY support which is
316 used on certain early LinkSys LNE100TX and Matrox FastNIC cards,
317 however it is horribly broken and difficult to use reliably.
318 Consequently, autonegotiation is not currently supported for this
319 chipset: the driver defaults the NIC to 10baseT half duplex, and it's
320 up to the operator to manually select a different mode if necessary.
321 (Later cards use an external MII transceiver to implement NWAY
322 autonegotiation and work correctly.)
326 driver programs 82c168 and 82c169 PNIC chips to use the store and
327 forward setting for the transmit start threshold by default.
329 is to work around problems with some NIC/PCI bus combinations where
330 the PNIC can transmit corrupt frames when operating at 100Mbps,
331 probably due to PCI DMA burst transfer errors.
333 The 82c168 and 82c169 PNIC chips also have a receiver bug that
334 sometimes manifests during periods of heavy receive and transmit
335 activity, where the chip will improperly DMA received frames to
337 The chips appear to upload several kilobytes of garbage
338 data along with the received frame data, dirtying several RX buffers
339 instead of just the expected one.
342 driver detects this condition and will salvage the frame; however,
343 it incurs a serious performance penalty in the process.
345 The PNIC chips also sometimes generate a transmit underrun error when
346 the driver attempts to download the receiver filter setup frame, which
347 can result in the receive filter being incorrectly programmed.
350 driver will watch for this condition and requeue the setup frame until
351 it is transferred successfully.
353 The ADMtek AL981 chip (and possibly the AN985 as well) has been observed
354 to sometimes wedge on transmit: this appears to happen when the driver
355 queues a sequence of frames which cause it to wrap from the end of the
356 transmit descriptor ring back to the beginning.
359 driver attempts to avoid this condition by not queueing any frames past
360 the end of the transmit ring during a single invocation of the
363 This workaround has a negligible impact on transmit performance.