bge.4freebsd

Langue: en

Version: 300475 (debian - 07/07/09)

Section: 4 (Pilotes et protocoles réseau)


BSD mandoc

NAME

bge - Broadcom BCM570x/5714/5721/5722/5750/5751/5752/5789 PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver

SYNOPSIS

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

Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf5:

 if_bge_load="YES"
 

DESCRIPTION

The driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom BCM570x, 5714, 5721, 5722, 5750, 5751, 5752 and 5789 families of Gigabit Ethernet controller chips.

All of these NICs are capable of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds over CAT5 copper cable, except for the SysKonnect SK-9D41 which supports only 1000Mbps over multimode fiber. The BCM570x builds upon the technology of the Alteon Tigon II. It has two R4000 CPU cores and is PCI v2.2 and PCI-X v1.0 compliant. It supports IP, TCP and UDP checksum offload for both receive and transmit, multiple RX and TX DMA rings for QoS applications, rules-based receive filtering, and VLAN tag stripping/insertion as well as a 256-bit multicast hash filter. Additional features may be provided via value-add firmware updates. The BCM570x supports TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which means it can be used with either copper or 1000baseX fiber applications. Note however the device only supports a single speed in TBI mode.

Most BCM5700-based cards also use the Broadcom BCM5401 or BCM5411 10/100/1000 copper gigabit transceivers, which support autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in full or half duplex.

The BCM5700, BCM5701, BCM5702, BCM5703 and BCM5704 also support jumbo frames, which can be configured via the interface MTU setting. Selecting an MTU larger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter to receive and transmit jumbo frames. Using jumbo frames can greatly improve performance for certain tasks, such as file transfers and data streaming.

The 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.conf5.
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. Only full-duplex mode is supported.
1000baseSX
Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation. Both full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

The driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex
Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex
Force half duplex operation.

The driver also supports one special link option for 1000baseTX cards:

link0
With 1000baseTX cards, establishing a link between 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 driver 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 ifconfig(8).

HARDWARE

The driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom BCM570x family of Gigabit Ethernet controller chips, including the following:

LOADER TUNABLES

The following tunable can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel, or stored in loader.conf5.
hw.bge.allow_asf
Allow the ASF feature for cooperating with IPMI. Can cause system lockup problems on a small number of systems. Disabled by default.

DIAGNOSTICS

"bge%d: couldn't map memory"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
"bge%d: couldn't map ports"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
"bge%d: couldn't map interrupt"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
"bge%d: no memory for softc struct!"
The driver failed to allocate memory for per-device instance information during initialization.
"bge%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.
"bge%d: no memory for jumbo buffers!"
The driver failed to allocate memory for jumbo frames during initialization.
"bge%d: watchdog timeout"
The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).

SEE ALSO

altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether4, polling(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

The device driver first appeared in Fx 4.5 .

AUTHORS

The driver was written by An Bill Paul Aq wpaul@windriver.com .