NAME

       ae — Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller driver

SYNOPSIS

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

             device miibus
             device ae

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

             if_ae_load="YES"

DEPRECATION NOTICE

       The      ae     driver     is     not     present     in     FreeBSD     13.0     and     later.      See
       https://github.com/freebsd/fcp/blob/master/fcp-0101.md for more information.

DESCRIPTION

       The ae device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers.

       The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion  and
       an interrupt moderation mechanism.  Attansic L2 also features a 64-bit multicast hash filter.

       The ae 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 rc.conf(5).

       10baseT/UTP  Select 10Mbps operation.

       100baseTX    Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.

       The ae driver provides support for the following media options:

       full-duplex  Force full duplex operation.

       half-duplex  Force half duplex operation.

       For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

HARDWARE

       The ae driver supports Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers, and is  known  to  support  the
       following hardware:

       •   ASUS EeePC 701
       •   ASUS EeePC 900

       Other hardware may or may not work with this driver.

LOADER TUNABLES

       Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).

       hw.ae.msi_disable
               This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware.  The default value is 0.

SYSCTL VARIABLES

       The  ae  driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work.  The statistics is available via
       the dev.ae.%d.stats sysctl(8) tree, where %d corresponds to the controller number.

DIAGNOSTICS

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

       ae%d: reset timeout.  The card reset operation has been timed out.

       ae%d: Generating random ethernet address.  No valid Ethernet address was found in  the  controller  NVRAM
       and registers.  Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used instead.

SEE ALSO

       altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

       The  ae driver and this manual page was written by Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>.  It first appeared
       in FreeBSD 7.1.

BUGS

       The Attansic L2 FastEthernet controller supports DMA  but  does  not  use  a  descriptor  based  transfer
       mechanism  via  scatter-gather DMA.  Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each
       transmit/receive.  Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions apply.  This may  introduce  a  high
       CPU  load  on systems with heavy network activity.  Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern
       hardware as L2 does not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.

Debian                                          October 24, 2018                                           AE(4)