Ubuntu Manpage: le — AMD Am7900 LANCE and Am79C9xx ILACC/PCnet Ethernet interface driver

Provided by: freebsd-manpages_10.1~RC1-1_all

NAME

     le — AMD Am7900 LANCE and Am79C9xx ILACC/PCnet Ethernet interface driver

SYNOPSIS

     To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel
     configuration file:

           device le

     Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in
     loader.conf(5):

           if_le_load="YES"

     For C-Bus non-PnP adapters, the port address and the IRQ number have to be specified in
     /boot/device.hints:
     hint.le.0.at="isa"
     hint.le.0.port="0x03d0"
     hint.le.0.irq="6"

     For ISA non-PnP adapters, the port address as well as the IRQ and the DRQ numbers have to be
     specified in /boot/device.hints:
     hint.le.0.at="isa"
     hint.le.0.port="0x280"
     hint.le.0.irq="10"
     hint.le.0.drq="0"

DESCRIPTION

     The le driver provides support for Ethernet adapters based on the AMD Am7990 and Am79C90
     (CMOS, pin-compatible) Local Area Network Controller for Ethernet (LANCE) chips.

     The le driver also supports Ethernet adapters based on the AMD Am79C900 Integrated Local
     Area Communications Controller (ILACC) as well as the Am79C9xx PCnet family of chips, which
     are single-chip implementations of a LANCE chip and a DMA engine.  This includes a superset
     of the PCI bus Ethernet chips supported by the pcn(4) driver.  The le driver treats all of
     these PCI bus Ethernet chips as an AMD Am79C970 PCnet-PCI and does not support the
     additional features like the MII bus and burst mode of AMD Am79C971 PCnet-FAST and greater
     chips.  Thus the pcn(4) driver should be preferred for the latter.

     Generally, the le driver aims at supporting as many different chips on as many different
     platforms as possible, partially at the cost of the best performance with some of these.

     The le driver supports reception and transmission of extended frames for vlan(4).  Selective
     reception of multicast Ethernet frames is provided by a 64-bit mask; multicast destination
     addresses are hashed to a bit entry using the Ethernet CRC function.

HARDWARE

C-Bus and ISA
The le driver supports C-Bus and ISA bus Ethernet adapters which are based on the following
chips:

• AMD Am7990 and Am79C90 LANCE
• AMD Am79C960 PCnet-ISA
• AMD Am79C961 PCnet-ISA+
• AMD Am79C961A PCnet-ISA II

This includes support for the following Ethernet adapters:

C-Bus non-PnP:

• Contec C-NET(98)S

ISA non-PnP:

• BICC Isolan
• Novell NE2100

ISA PnP:

• AMD AM1500T/AM2100
• AMD PCnet-32
• AMD PCnet-ISA
• Allied Telesyn AT-1500
• Boca LANCard Combo
• Cabletron E2100 Series DNI
• Cabletron E2200 Single Chip
• Melco Inc. LGY-IV
• Novell NE2100
• Racal InterLan EtherBlaster

The le driver does not support the selection of media types and options via ifconfig(8) with
C-Bus and ISA bus Ethernet adapters.

PCI
The PCI bus Ethernet chips supported by the le driver are:

• AMD Am53C974/Am79C970/Am79C974 PCnet-PCI
• AMD Am79C970A PCnet-PCI II
• AMD Am79C971 PCnet-FAST
• AMD Am79C972 PCnet-FAST+
• AMD Am79C973/Am79C975 PCnet-FAST III
• AMD Am79C976 PCnet-PRO
• AMD Am79C978 PCnet-Home

This includes support for the following Ethernet adapters:

• AcerLAN NIC P20
• Allied Telesyn AT-2450 and AT-2700 series
• VMware emulated AMD Am79C970A PCnet-PCI II interface

The le driver supports the selection of the following media types via ifconfig(8) with PCI
bus Ethernet adapters:

autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type.

10baseT/UTP Select UTP media.

10base5/AUI Select AUI/BNC media.

The following media option is supported with these media types:

full-duplex Select full duplex operation.

Note that unlike the pcn(4) driver, the le driver does not support selecting 100Mbps (Fast
Ethernet) media types.

sparc64
The le driver supports the on-board LANCE interfaces found in Sun Ultra 1 machines. The le
driver allows the selection of the following media types via ifconfig(8) with these on-board
interfaces:

autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type.

10baseT/UTP Select UTP media.

10base5/AUI Select AUI media.

When using autoselection, a default media type is selected for use by examining all ports
for carrier. The first media type with which a carrier is detected will be selected.
Additionally, if carrier is dropped on a port, the driver will switch between the possible
ports until one with carrier is found.

The le driver also supports the following Sun SBus Ethernet add-on adapters:

• SCSI HBA and Buffered Ethernet (SBE/S, P/N 501-1869)
• Fast SCSI and Buffered Ethernet (FSBE/S, P/N 501-2015 and 501-2981)

The le driver does not support the selection of media types and options via ifconfig(8) with
SBus Ethernet add-on adapters.

For further information on configuring media types and options, see ifconfig(8).

DIAGNOSTICS

le%d: overflow More packets came in from the Ethernet than there was space in the LANCE
receive buffers. Packets were missed.

le%d: receive buffer error The LANCE ran out of buffer space, packet dropped.

le%d: lost carrier The Ethernet carrier disappeared during an attempt to transmit. The
LANCE will finish transmitting the current packet, but will not automatically retry
transmission if there is a collision.

le%d: excessive collisions, tdr %d The Ethernet was extremely busy or jammed, outbound
packets were dropped after 16 attempts to retransmit.

TDR is the abbreviation of "Time Domain Reflectometry". The optionally reported TDR value
is an internal counter of the interval between the start of a transmission and the
occurrence of a collision. This value can be used to determine the distance from the
Ethernet tap to the point on the Ethernet cable that is shorted or open (unterminated).

le%d: dropping chained buffer A packet did not fit into a single receive buffer and was
dropped. Since the le driver allocates buffers large enough to receive maximum sized
Ethernet packets, this means some other station on the LAN transmitted a packet larger than
allowed by the Ethernet standard.

le%d: transmit buffer error The LANCE ran out of buffer space before finishing the
transmission of a packet. If this error occurs, the driver software has a bug.

le%d: underflow The LANCE ran out of buffer space before finishing the transmission of a
packet. If this error occurs, the driver software has a bug.

le%d: controller failed to initialize Driver failed to start the LANCE. This is
potentially a hardware failure.

le%d: memory error RAM failed to respond within the timeout when the LANCE wanted to read
or write it. This is potentially a hardware failure.

le%d: receiver disabled The receiver of the LANCE was turned off due to an error.

le%d: transmitter disabled The transmitter of the LANCE was turned off due to an error.

HISTORY

     The le driver was ported from NetBSD and first appeared in FreeBSD 6.1.  The NetBSD version
     in turn was derived from the le driver which first appeared in 4.4BSD.

AUTHORS

     The le driver was ported by Marius Strobl <marius@FreeBSD.org>.