NAME

vte —

Vortex86 RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet driver

SYNOPSIS

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

device miibus
device vte

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

if_vte_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The vte device driver provides support for RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controller which is commonly found on Vortex86 System On a Chip (SoC).

The RDC R6040 has integrated 10/100 PHY for 10/100Mbps support in full or half-duplex. The controller supports interrupt moderation mechanism, a 64-bit multicast hash filter, VLAN over-size frame and four station addresses. The vte device driver uses three station addresses out of four as perfect multicast filter.

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

The vte driver supports 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 vte device driver provides support for the following Ethernet controllers:

DM&P Vortex86 RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controller

LOADER TUNABLES

Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).

hw.vte.tx_deep_copy: The RDC R6040 controller has no auto-padding support for short frames and the controller's DMA engine does not have capability to handle multiple buffers for a TX frame such that driver has to create a single contiguous TX buffer. This hardware limitation leads to poor TX performance since most of CPU cycles are wasted on both de-fragmenting mbuf chains and padding. This tunable enables deep copy operation for TX frames such that driver will spend less CPU cycles in de-fragmentation with the cost of extra TX buffer memory. The default value is 1 to use deep copy.

SYSCTL VARIABLES

The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables:

dev.vte.%d.rx_mod: Maximum number of packets to fire RX completion interrupt. The accepted range is 0 to 15, the default is 15.
dev.vte.%d.tx_mod: Maximum number of packets to fire TX completion interrupt. The accepted range is 0 to 15, the default is 15.
dev.vte.%d.stats: Show hardware MAC statistics maintained in driver.

HISTORY

The vte driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon <yongari@FreeBSD.org>. It first appeared in FreeBSD 8.3.