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.