Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)

FreeBSD Manual Pages

  
 
  

home | help 
AE(4)			 BSD 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
     FastEthernet controllers.

     The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum	processing, hardware
     VLAN tag stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism.  At-
     tansic 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:

     o	 ASUS EeePC 701
     o	 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 net-
     work, 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)

BUGS
     The Attansic L2 FastEthernet contoller 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/re-
     ceive.  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.

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

BSD				October	4, 2008				   BSD
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | HARDWARE | LOADER TUNABLES | SYSCTL VARIABLES | DIAGNOSTICS | SEE ALSO | BUGS | HISTORY

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ae&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE>

home | help