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VR(4)			     Kernel Interfaces Manual			   VR(4)

NAME
     vr -- VIA Technologies Rhine I/II/III Ethernet device driver

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

	   device miibus
	   device vr

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

	   if_vr_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION
     The  vr driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded con-
     trollers based on the VIA Technologies VT3043 Rhine I, VT86C100A Rhine  II,
     and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet controller chips.

     The  VIA  Rhine  chips  use bus master DMA and have a descriptor layout de-
     signed to resemble that of the DEC 21x4x "tulip" chips.  The register  lay-
     out  is different however and the receive filter in the Rhine chips is much
     simpler and is programmed through registers rather than  by  downloading  a
     special  setup frame through the transmit DMA engine.  Transmit and receive
     DMA buffers must be longword aligned.  The Rhine chips are meant to be  in-
     terfaced with external physical layer devices via an MII bus.  They support
     both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.

     The vr 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 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 vr 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
     The vr driver supports VIA Technologies Rhine I, Rhine II,  and  Rhine  III
     based Fast Ethernet adapters including:

     *	 AOpen/Acer ALN-320
     *	 D-Link DFE520-TX
     *	 D-Link DFE530-TX
     *	 Hawking Technologies PN102TX
     *	 Soekris Engineering net5501

SYSCTL VARIABLES
     The following variables are available as sysctl(8) variables:

     dev.vr.%d.stats
	     Display lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver.

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

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

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

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

     vr%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.

     vr%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 con-
     troller 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 operat-
     ing  system.   If	you power down your system prior to booting FreeBSD, the
     card should be configured correctly.

SEE ALSO
     altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4),  ng_ether(4),  polling(4),  ifcon-
     fig(8)

     The VIA Technologies VT86C100A data sheet, http://www.via.com.tw.

HISTORY
     The vr device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

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

BUGS
     The  vr  driver  always  copies  transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
     buffers prior to transmission in order  to  pacify  the  Rhine  chips.   If
     buffers  are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the supplied buffer
     address and begin DMAing from the wrong location.	This buffer copying  im-
     pairs  transmit  performance  on  slower systems but cannot be avoided.  On
     faster machines (e.g. a Pentium II), the performance impact  is  much  less
     noticeable.

FreeBSD ports 15.quarterly	February 25, 2012			   VR(4)

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