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NAME

      vr - VIA Technologies Rhine I/II/III Ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS

      To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
      kernel configuration file:
 
            device miibus
            device vr
 
      Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the
      following line in loader.conf(5):
 
            if_vr_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

      The vr driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
      controllers based on the VIA Technologies VT3043 Rhine I, VT86C100A Rhine
      II, and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet controller chips.
 
      The VIA Rhine chips use bus master DMA and have a descriptor layout
      designed to resemble that of the DEC 21x4x “tulip” chips.  The register
      layout is different however and the receive filter in the Rhine chips is
      much simpler and is programmed through registers rather than by download‐
      ing a special setup frame through the transmit DMA engine.  Transmit and
      receive DMA buffers must be longword aligned.  The Rhine chips are meant
      to be interfaced with external physical layer devices via an MII bus.
      They support both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
 
      The vr driver supports the following media types:
 
      autoselect            Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
                            The user can manually override the autoselected
                            mode by adding media options to the /etc/rc.conf
                            file.
 
      10baseT/UTP           Set 10Mbps operation.  The mediaopt option can also
                            be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex
                            modes.
 
      100baseTX             Set 100Mbps (Fast Fthernet) operation.  The
                            mediaopt option can also be used to select either
                            full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
 
      The vr driver supports the following media options:
 
      full-duplex           Force full duplex operation
 
      half-duplex           Force half duplex operation.
 
      Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported by the
      adapter.  For more information on configuring this device, see
      ifconfig(8).

HARDWARE

      The vr driver supports VIA Technologies Rhine I, Rhine II, and Rhine III
      based Fast Ethernet adapters including:
 
            AOpen/Acer ALN-320
            D-Link DFE530-TX
            Hawking Technologies PN102TX

DIAGNOSTICS

      vr%d: couldn     t map memory  A fatal initialization error has occurred.
 
      vr%d: couldn     t map interrupt  A fatal initialization error has occurred.
 
      vr%d: watchdog timeout  The device has stopped responding to the network,
      or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
 
      vr%d: no memory for rx list  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
      the receiver ring.
 
      vr%d: no memory for tx list  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
      the transmitter ring when allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf
      chain into a cluster.
 
      vr%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0  This message applies
      only to adapters which support power management.  Some operating systems
      place the controller in low power mode when shutting down, and some PCI
      BIOSes fail to bring the chip out of this state before configuring it.
      The controller loses all of its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if
      the BIOS does not set it back to full power mode in time, it will not be
      able to configure it correctly.  The driver tries to detect this condi‐
      tion and bring the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this
      may not be enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.
      If you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach the
      device as a network interface, you will have to perform second warm boot
      to have the device properly configured.
 
      Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another oper‐
      ating system.  If you power down your system prior to booting FreeBSD,
      the card should be configured correctly.
      arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), polling(4), ifconfig(8)
 
      The VIA Technologies VT86C100A data sheet, http://www.via.com.tw.

HISTORY

      The vr device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

      The vr driver was written by Bill Paul 〈wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu〉.

BUGS

      The vr driver always copies transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
      buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify the Rhine chips.  If
      buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the supplied
      buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location.  This buffer
      copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but cannot be
      avoided.  On faster machines (e.g. a Pentium II), the performance impact
      is much less noticeable.