Ubuntu Manpage: rl — RealTek 8129/8139 Fast Ethernet device driver

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NAME

     rl — RealTek 8129/8139 Fast Ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS

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

           device miibus
           device rl

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

           if_rl_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The rl driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded controllers based on
the RealTek 8129 and 8139 Fast Ethernet controller chips.

The RealTek 8129/8139 series controllers use bus master DMA but do not use a descriptor-
based data transfer mechanism. The receiver uses a single fixed size ring buffer from which
packets must be copied into mbufs. For transmission, there are only four outbound packet
address registers which require all outgoing packets to be stored as contiguous buffers.
Furthermore, outbound packet buffers must be longword aligned or else transmission will
fail.

The 8129 differs from the 8139 in that the 8139 has an internal PHY which is controlled
through special direct access registers whereas the 8129 uses an external PHY via an MII
bus. The 8139 supports both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex. The 8129
can support the same speeds and modes given an appropriate PHY chip.

Note: support for the 8139C+ chip is provided by the re(4) driver.

The rl driver supports the following media types:

autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type and options. This is only
supported if the PHY chip attached to the RealTek controller supports
NWAY autonegotiation. 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 Ethernet) operation. The mediaopt option can also
be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

The rl 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

     Adapters supported by the rl driver include:

     •   Accton “Cheetah” EN1207D (MPX 5030/5038; RealTek 8139 clone)
     •   Allied Telesyn AT2550
     •   Allied Telesyn AT2500TX
     •   Belkin F5D5000
     •   BUFFALO (Melco INC.) LPC-CB-CLX (CardBus)
     •   Compaq HNE-300
     •   CompUSA no-name 10/100 PCI Ethernet NIC
     •   Corega FEther CB-TXD
     •   Corega FEtherII CB-TXD
     •   D-Link DFE-520TX (rev. C1)
     •   D-Link DFE-528TX
     •   D-Link DFE-530TX+
     •   D-Link DFE-538TX
     •   D-Link DFE-690TXD
     •   Edimax EP-4103DL CardBus
     •   Encore ENL832-TX 10/100 M PCI
     •   Farallon NetLINE 10/100 PCI
     •   Genius GF100TXR
     •   GigaFast Ethernet EE100-AXP
     •   KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet
     •   LevelOne FPC-0106TX
     •   Longshine LCS-8038TX-R
     •   NDC Communications NE100TX-E
     •   Netronix Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100
     •   Nortel Networks 10/100BaseTX
     •   OvisLink LEF-8129TX
     •   OvisLink LEF-8139TX
     •   Peppercon AG ROL-F
     •   Planex FNW-3603-TX
     •   Planex FNW-3800-TX
     •   SMC EZ Card 10/100 PCI 1211-TX
     •   SOHO (PRAGMATIC) UE-1211C

LOADER TUNABLES

     dev.rl.%unit.prefer_iomap
             This tunable controls which register mapping should be used on the specified device.
             A non-zero value enables I/O space register mapping.  For controllers that have no
             I/O space register mapping this tunable should be set to 0 to use memory space
             register mapping.  The default value is 1 to use I/O space register mapping.

     dev.rl.%unit.twister_enable
             Non-zero value enables the long cable tuning on the specified device.  Disabled by
             default.

DIAGNOSTICS

rl%d: couldn't map memory A fatal initialization error has occurred.

rl%d: couldn't map interrupt A fatal initialization error has occurred.

rl%d: watchdog timeout The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a
problem with the network connection (cable).

rl%d: no memory for rx list The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.

rl%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.

rl%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 condition 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 operating system. If
you power down your system prior to booting FreeBSD, the card should be configured
correctly.

HISTORY

     The rl device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

     The rl driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.

BUGS

Since outbound packets must be longword aligned, the transmit routine has to copy an
unaligned packet into an mbuf cluster buffer before transmission. The driver abuses the
fact that the cluster buffer pool is allocated at system startup time in a contiguous region
starting at a page boundary. Since cluster buffers are 2048 bytes, they are longword
aligned by definition. The driver probably should not be depending on this characteristic.

The RealTek data sheets are of especially poor quality, and there is a lot of information
missing particularly concerning the receiver operation. One particularly important fact
that the data sheets fail to mention relates to the way in which the chip fills in the
receive buffer. When an interrupt is posted to signal that a frame has been received, it is
possible that another frame might be in the process of being copied into the receive buffer
while the driver is busy handling the first one. If the driver manages to finish processing
the first frame before the chip is done DMAing the rest of the next frame, the driver may
attempt to process the next frame in the buffer before the chip has had a chance to finish
DMAing all of it.

The driver can check for an incomplete frame by inspecting the frame length in the header
preceding the actual packet data: an incomplete frame will have the magic length of 0xFFF0.
When the driver encounters this value, it knows that it has finished processing all
currently available packets. Neither this magic value nor its significance are documented
anywhere in the RealTek data sheets.