vge(4)

NAME

vge - VIA Networking Technologies VT6122 PCI Gigabit Ether

net adapter
driver

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

The vge driver provides support for various NICs and embed

ded Ethernet
interfaces based on the VIA Networking Technologies VT6122

Gigabit Ethernet controller chips.

The VT6122 is a 33/66Mhz 64-bit PCI device which combines a

tri-speed MAC
with an integrated 10/100/1000 copper PHY. (Some older

cards use an
external PHY.) The MAC supports TCP/IP hardware checksums

(IPv4 only),
TCP large send, VLAN tag insertion and stripping, as well as

VLAN filtering, a 64-entry CAM filter and a 64-entry VLAN filter,

64-bit multicast
hash filter, 4 separate transmit DMA queues, flow control

and jumbo
frames up to 16K in size. The VT6122 has a 16K receive FIFO

and 48K
transmit FIFO.

The vge driver takes advantage of the VT6122's checksum of

fload and VLAN
tagging features, as well as the jumbo frame and CAM filter

support. The
CAM filter is used for multicast address filtering to pro

vide 64 perfect
multicast address filter support. If it is necessary for

the interface
to join more than 64 multicast groups, the driver will

switch over to
using the hash filter.

The jumbo frame support can be enabled by setting the inter

face MTU to
any value larger than the default of 1500 bytes, up to a

maximum of 9000
bytes. The receive and transmit checksum offload support

can be toggled
on and off using the ifconfig(8) utility.

The vge 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 Set 10Mbps operation. The ifconfig(8)

mediaopt option

can also be used to select either

full-duplex or
half-duplex modes.

100baseTX Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. The

ifconfig(8)

mediaopt option can also be used to select

either
full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

1000baseTX Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair.

The

ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be

used to select
either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

The vge driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex Force full duplex operation.

half-duplex Force half duplex operation.

The vge driver also supports one special link option for

1000baseTX
cards:

link0 With 1000baseTX cards, establishing a link be

tween two ports

requires that one port be configured as a master

and the other
a slave. With autonegotiation, the master/slave

settings will
be chosen automatically. However when manually

selecting the
link state, it is necessary to force one side of

the link to
be a master and the other a slave. The vge driv

er configures
the ports as slaves by default. Setting the

link0 flag with
ifconfig(8) will set a port as a master instead.

For more information on configuring this device, see ifcon

fig(8).

HARDWARE

The vge driver supports VIA Networking VT3119 and VT6122

based Gigabit
Ethernet adapters including:

+o VIA Networking LAN-on-motherboard Gigabit Ethernet
+o ZyXEL GN650-T 64-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1701)
+o ZyXEL GN670-T 32-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1702)

DIAGNOSTICS

vge%d: couldn't map memory A fatal initialization error has

occurred.

vge%d: couldn't map ports A fatal initialization error has

occurred.

vge%d: couldn't map interrupt A fatal initialization error

has occurred.

vge%d: failed to enable memory mapping! The driver failed

to initialize
PCI shared memory mapping. This might happen if the card is

not in a
bus-master slot.

vge%d: watchdog timeout The device has stopped responding

to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (ca

ble).

SEE ALSO

arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), polling(4),

vlan(4),
ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

The vge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.3.

AUTHORS

The vge driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@windriv

er.com>.

BSD July 16, 2005

BSD