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AE(4)			     Kernel Interfaces Manual			   AE(4)

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"

DESCRIPTION
     The ae device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEth-
     ernet controllers.

     The  controller  supports	hardware  Ethernet checksum processing, hardware
     VLAN tag stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism.  Attan-
     sic 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 neither in the controller registers not in NVRAM.  Random locally ad-
     ministered 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)

BUGS
     The Attansic L2 FastEthernet contoller supports DMA but do not  use  a  de-
     scriptor  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 intro-
     duce 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 sup-
     port speeds faster than 100Mbps.

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

FreeBSD 7.1			 October 4, 2008			   AE(4)
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